Musk: Meta stole Twitter's trade secrets to launch Threads

Elon Musk issues a cease-and-desist letter to Mark Zuckerberg on day Threads is released | Twitter boss claims that Meta stole trade secrets to launch the rival platform | ‘Competition is fine, cheating is not’...[Meta] will lose this battle,' tweets Musk.

The bitter and public rivalry between  Twitter owner  Elon Musk and the man behind  Meta,  Mark Zuckerberg, has just turned even more sour.

When word got out last month that Meta was planning to launch a competitor to Twitter in the shape of  Threads, Musk  tweeted in his characteristically acerbic fashion: “I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options.

"At least it will be ‘sane’. Was worried there for a moment [laughing emoji].”

Musk—who founded  Tesla and  SpaceX and said to be the world’s wealthiest person—swiftly laid down the gauntlet by challenging Zuckerberg to an actual cage fight,  tweeting: “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.”

Zuckerberg—founder, chairman and CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook—apparently accepted the challenge, posting on his  Instagram feed “Send me location” [sic].

A ‘copycat’ app

Now, on the same day that Threads launched this week, Wednesday July 5, Musk has fired a shot across the boughs in the form of a cease-and-desist letter to Zuckerberg, accusing Meta of misappropriating trade secrets and “other intellectual property”.

The Twitter owner accuses his rival of poaching “dozens of” Twitter employees who “have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information”, to create the “copycat” platform.

Replying to a tweet about the letter by  T(w)itter Daily News (Titter Daily), Musk  tweeted yesterday (July 6): “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

Separately, on the same day, Musk  tweeted: "BREAKING: I am officially suing Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram 'Threads.'

"They will lose this battle.

"Trust me."

The tweet was accompanied by a screenshot of a letter from Musk's lawyer,  Alex Spiro—a partner at Quinn Emanuel in New York.

In the letter, Spiro alleged that: “Twitter knows…that many of these employees 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, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter.”

Addressing this charge, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone  posted on Threads: “To be clear: ‘No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.’”

In the C&D letter, Spiro went on to demand that Meta “take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information”.

He added that Meta is “expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter's followers or following data”.

A point of distinction

Described as “a new app, built by the Instagram team, for sharing text updates and joining public conversations”, Threads saw more than 30 million users sign up within the first 24 hours.

It was rolled out in more than 100 countries, including the UK and US—but its European debut is delayed due to  concerns over data privacy under EU law.

While it doesn’t yet have the comprehensive range of functions that Twitter has, and users access it via an Instagram account, Meta is positioning Threads as a more ‘friendly’ platform than its competitor.

In response to this goal,  Musk tweeted: “It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram.”

Writing on Twitter, Zuckerberg posted: “The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success. That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”

This is likely a direct reference to Twitter’s reputation as an inflammatory forum, which has grown since Musk acquired the platform last October for $44 million.

Just a few months later, Twitter’s value had halved, Musk had laid off half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees and a further 25% resigned, and  advertisers had walked. In a bid to cut costs, he has also made controversial reforms to the site, affecting how users can interact, such as introducing a subscription membership and limiting the number of posts that non-subscribers can access.

While we await Zuckerberg’s response to Musk’s threat of litigation, there is at least the proposed cage fight—and its associated myriad memes and social media posts—to keep an eye on.