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.
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?
"Poaching", because to them competing in the free market is bad when workers do it apparently.
Exactly. The "free market" is only a rhetorical tool that they use to trick people into believing that what is happening to them is in any way fair.
When it benefits them, they use it as a cudgel. When it doesn't benefit them, they ignore the concept entirely (or even become hostile toward it).
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.
ThAt'S mY pRoPeRtY!
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.