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.
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."
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.
TBH I think threads owes more to instagram than twitter.. which makes total sense given that Meta owns both. They even share user lists.. The similarity with twitter is they're both primarily text based..
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.
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.
Smells like the idiotic "poaching" concept in which companies think they have a right to their employees and their skills. Musk fired people like a dumbass who then found new jobs working on something they have experience in. What did he think would happen? Everybody goes back to the money their families' emerald mines shed out?
It's about the same as a mafia hitman screeching in court after a guilty verdict that he wants the written receipts, and murder weapons that were found in the garbage on the curb in front of his home (and used to convict him) back.
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, it's almost comical. Facebook has more users than Twitter, more features and more content to manage. Their own product Instagram is basically a superset of Twitter afaik (I use neither though). Even if anything Musk said is true, Facebook/Meta would be fully in the right to hire engineers Twitter just fired; no-compete-clauses are illegal in their jurisdiction. I think.
Yes, Instagram has always worked on the exact same social model as Twitter (asymmetric following). It’s basically Twitter where you have to post a photo. The idea that they needed “trade secrets” to release Threads is perhaps one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Fire people without knowing anything about the business, just for feeling powerful
People go working for competition (it turns out employers don't own employees for life)
Competition is advantaged by the know how of these people
Be mad
Lawyers come with the idea that ex employees retained company property (because, again, you don't own the person). Something either very stupid from Twitter to not ask for corporate equipment or blantly false
IRC Musk also fired much of Twitter's legal department. I wouldn't be surprised if meta hired plenty of them too, so they know where the bodies are buried.
This isn't the first time Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan have been involved in proceedings against Zuckerberg. I assume he's more prepared this time around.
But Musk will likely get a settlement out of it. That's simply how the world works. Shit floats.
When? Last I checked, he's still down about 92 billion dollars.
Elmo's Twitter fiasco is legitimately dumber than Trump running not one, but THREE casinos to bankruptcy.
Unfortunately his net worth has really jumped up since acquiring Twitter. He briefly went to #2 in the world, but has rebounded back to about $250B, which is where he was.
Regarding #5. Twitter was a bit of a disaster regarding asset recovery before a bunch of people got fired. They often failed to make sure assets were sent back in a timely fashion. When musk fired everyone, I’m sure that problem got really bad and that Twitter failed to send instructions or materials for asset collection. People lost access to their corporate accounts and computers, but I’m guessing Twitter didn’t bother to collect all the assets so some ex employees probably still do have laptops or monitors because they literally don’t know what to do with them. I have no idea how big of a problem that might be.
Typical Elon :) The guy cheats and lies routinely but cries when someone else does it. What's up with billionaries having no self relection whatsoever... Maybe it's built into them and part of why they think of themselves so highly.
I would call this cheating. It's anti-competitive behavior to prevent another company from building a product similar to yours. The irony is they never would have done it if he hadn't destroyed twitter lol
Even if it's true that Meta hired Ex-Twitter folks, what secrets could they possibly bring with them? A basic grasp how Twitter works conceptually? This is common knowledge. Architectural stuff? This is Meta ffs, they literally scaled FB and Instagram to billions of users.
Musk says lots of things, few of them true, less of them provable in court. Let him burn even more of his money on an army of lawyers fighting Meta trying to prove that somebody hurt hs feelings.
this isn't a problem. better, it's a nice way to distract him from his bizarre, fascist crusade.