Twitter owner Elon Musk has gone head on threatening to sue Meta and Mark Zuckerberg following a successful launch of Threads, an app meant to compete with Twitter.
In a tweet, Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
Musk’s tweet came after his lawyer, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Zuckerberg accusing Meta of “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
Spiro claimed that Meta had hired dozens of former Twitter employees who had access to Twitter’s confidential information and used it to develop Threads in a matter of months.
Spiro demanded that Meta stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information and warned that Twitter would seek legal action to protect its intellectual property rights. He also reminded Meta that it was prohibited from crawling or scraping Twitter’s followers or following data, which is a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service.
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote. “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.”
Spiro also instructed Meta to preserve any documents that could be relevant to a dispute between Twitter, Meta, and/or former Twitter employees who now work for Meta.
He said that this included all documents related to the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of these former Twitter employees, the development of Meta’s competing Threads app, and any communications between these former Twitter employees and any agent, representative, or employee of Meta.
The letter from Spiro is the latest escalation in the rivalry between Musk and Zuckerberg, who have clashed over various issues such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and space exploration.
Threads, a new text-based conversation app developed by Meta, made its debut on Wednesday and received a remarkably positive response from users. Within a mere 24 hours of its launch, Threads amassed a staggering 30 million sign-ups, showcasing its immense popularity. A notable advantage of Threads is its seamless integration with Instagram profiles, streamlining the sign-up process and endowing the Twitter competitor with an existing user base.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, expressed his ambition for Threads to become a prominent “public conversations app with over 1 billion users,” an aspiration that he believes Twitter has yet to fully achieve. In a noteworthy statement, Zuckerberg emphasized Meta’s determination to succeed where Twitter may have fallen short.
However, Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, promptly addressed the letter asserting that none of the engineers on the Threads team had previously worked at Twitter.