A top lawyer for Twitter owner Elon Musk says the platform has “serious concerns” that Facebook parent Meta hired “dozens of former Twitter employees” in order to build its new “copycat” Threads app — accusations that Meta denies.
In a Wednesday letter addressed to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP partner Alex Spiro, a longtime lawyer for Musk and his businesses, notified the rival tech executive that Twitter’s new parent company plans “to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights.”
Spiro asserted that in rolling out its Threads social media app, which launched Wednesday, Meta relied on the work of “dozens of former Twitter employees” who “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.”
“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app,” the letter said.
In April, Twitter was hit with a proposed class action from former employees following Musk’s $44 billion deal to take the company private.
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023In response to reports of the letter, Musk wrote in a Twitter post, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
“Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter trade secrets and other intellectual property,” Spiro wrote.
In addition to alerting the company of the prospect of a lawsuit, Spiro’s letter asserted that Meta is “expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data.”
The letter did not specify which former Twitter employees Meta had allegedly assigned to its Threads development team or what intellectual property Meta purportedly misappropriated, outside of “trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
Aggressive enforcement of intellectual property rights is a bit of a change for Musk, who in 2014 announced that his electric car company, Tesla, would open up its patents to other manufacturers interested in using its technology. As recently as last year, during an appearance on the CNBC show “Jay Leno’s Garage,” Musk declared that “patents are for the weak.”
Meta spokesman Andy Stone responded to Spiro’s claims in a post on Threads, saying that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.”
“That’s just not a thing,” Stone said.
First he fires almost all Twitter employees, some even almost without warning, and then he complains that Meta has hired them to develop Threads.
There’s no getting around it, Musk has only led to the failure of what was, in part, one of the social networks with great potential.
Well if what the guy said is true and nobody from twitter is working on it that should be exceedingly easy to prove. Elon will get creamed in court and have even less money than he did before. Let’s keep that train rolling. Dude thinks he’s fucking Jesus Christ. He’s just a little bitch boy that used daddy’s seed money and got insanely lucky with PayPal . That’s it.
People want Musk and Zuck to battle in the octagon. I want them to battle out it in court, all the way down to the last penny. It would be the greatest wealth transfer to lawyers ever.
I hope Zuckerberg takes Musk up on the dick-measuring contest because I want the world to know that neither of them are as well-endowed as they think they are.
It won’t even go to court. Musk says X is all the proof some people need. When Twitter fails Musk can point to this (and the other ridiculous things he said) and say “It wasn’t my fault”.
He doesn’t have to prove it’s true, he just has to say it. Even if this did go to court and it was proven that not a single former Twitter employee worked on Threads he could still come out and say “We all know what happens behind closed doors” and now the failure is the legal system and not him, again.
Sadly he is a loud asshat that gets too much attention.
Dude was making fun of the people he fired on twitter, mocking people who weren’t sure they still had a job.
I hope they took every trade secret they had.
Even if the former Twitter engineers were working on Threads - so what?
I have had to demonstrate relevant skills and experience for every job I’ve ever applied for (beyond junior/trainee). This is just how the world works.
It’s almost like Musk doesn’t understand how enormously normal it is to use skills and experience gained in one job when you go to the next one.
And it’s not like Twitter has special IP - it’s a fairly straightforward system; the only difficulty is scale which Meta will already know all about.
Of course he has no concept of how this stuff works, he’s never had to work a day in his life, and he’s got no marketable skills beyond, “I have lots of money and I’m willing to riskily throw it around.”
I’m not sure that his malignant narcissism would allow him to even view situations like this as anything other than being 100% about him, and how (in his mind) he’s been wronged.
The core features of Twitter aren’t rocket science, and Meta already knows how to scale. Computer science students often build tiny scale Twitter clones as a portfolio project. Another shitty take from Musk
Yeah I’ve heard from web devs that theor “hello world” for a new framework is just the twitter UI. Twitter isn’t special Musk, a lot of people just use it to keep up with bands, news, or whatever interests they have.
You fired them. What were they supposed to do? Die in poverty? Have you had to work a day in your life?
Maybe he feels like some of those ancient Pharaohs who had the architects building their pyramids killed afterwards in order not to reveal anyone the inner secret passages.
Oh Musk totally wants his people to follow him into his tomb. He probably dreams of it.
Good luck enforcing that non-compete after firing 80% of your engineers Elon. I’d be really surprised if this holds any kind of water when it makes it to court.
Lay off more than 2/3 of your staff, you expect them all to spend their time waiting outside your office begging you to let them back, Elon?
You didn’t need them anymore at Twitter. They don’t need you now, and they won’t need any “Twitter trade secrets” to make a platform that is even a bit improved.
Good luck enforcing that non-compete
Can’t even enforce it anyways because it’s not enforceable in California, where twitter is based.
Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that California isn’t always the regulatory hell-hole it’s being made out to be by pundits. Non-competes are BS and I am happy California recognises this.
They are allowed to legally.
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Yeah, I would also go looking for a job that fits my experience if I was fired too. Dude played himself on this one.
When Elon fired all those people, he showed that he clearly did not care about them as either humans or as a valuable company resource.
Once they stopped working at Twitter, they stopped existing to him.
No, he took the time to publicly trash them after he fired them.
And Musk fired them without due cause and didn’t give them their severance. Soooooo what’s the issue?
Poor little Musk. Dump your employees on the street and they just might be hired by your competitors.
The free market is great!
No, not like that!
So you fired a ton of engineers unnecessarily, and then you’re surprised and upset when they get jobs with the competition? This is literally how capitalism and Musk’s “free speech absolutism” are supposed to work.
Everything this dude says and does is in bad faith.
Imagine if Bridge Company A sued Bridge Company B, for hiring a Bridge Builder that Bridge Company A previously fired
It’s stupider than that. It’s Bridge Company A suing Bridge Company B for hiring the guy who said where the rivets should go on bridge A to say where the rivets should go on bridge B.
Obviously Bridge Company A should be furious and bring the biggest lawsuit possible…
Yes, because Facebook clearly has no prior experience working on a revolutionary social media platform that can only display 280 characters per post. That advanced technology is decades ahead of everybody else and would not have been doable without Twitter’s IP being stolen.
Musk certainly cries like a little bitch far too often to have faith in him as CEO of 10 companies. Isn’t being CEO of 1 company a full time job?
He is a great demonstration that CEOs are overpaid douchebags who don’t really do anything. Being CEO of Tesla, spacex, neuralink, Twitter and spending hours a day jerking off as a regular user at Twitter… wtf does he do for those other companies?
