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.
Why not both? Imagine a cage in the courtroom and Elon and Zuck delivering testimonies between the rounds.
That could literally be a scene in Idiocracy.
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.
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…
He’s just doing this to disrupt a direct competitor. He fucking hates that he cannot control the world and the internet . He fucking hates that he’s known as space Karen. He’s probably had a few dozen little bitch boy melt downs since all this twitter shit went down, and I’ll be honest, I’m fucking here for it.
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.
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.
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.
How would a no compete even work in this scenario?
“I fired you but you cannot take a job in another social media company” hardly makes sense.
That’s literally what I no compete says, nonsensical as it sounds.
I had one in a contract that said I’m not allowed to work for any competitors or suppliers for 5 years. Totally unenforceable, likely illegal.
And since we regularly sent out for pizza, that means theoretically I couldn’t even work for pizza hut…
No competes are also non binding in California, where Twitter HQ is.
It’s understandable when you realize it’s included as boilerplate in most tech employment contracts. Very few employees outside of the Executive Suite can actually negotiate their contracts. So it would seem like employers are free to throw in whatever language they want, for everyone from the CEO down to the junior dev, and if a low level employee doesn’t like it, their only option is to not take the job.
But courts (particularly in California, where I bet most of these people are based) take a dim view of one-sided contract provisions like this. My understanding is that this language is unenforceable in California. If an employee legitimately did take confidential information or a trade secret to a competitor, that is enforceable, whether or not they left to work for that competitor. But the history of Silicon Valley is full of disgruntled techies who left a stifling job to start up the Next Big Thing. It’s in California’s best interest to encourage techies to migrate from one job to another freely (provided they still respect the confidentiality of both places)
Still, companies continue to include it, in the hopes that if they ever have to invoke it they get a sympathetic judge.
Musk even encouraged people he fired to work for a competitor in a post he made in November. I don’t have a link to it, but he was mocking their abilities and said that if their skills are so good, they will be welcome at another company.
Edit: found it
Lmao hilarious. Not that I like zuck but elon’s meltdown is a sight to behold.
He really is such an f’in douche. First he fired a a ton of people because he’s cheap and is a moron who doesn’t comprehend the business he just bought… then goes around mocking them to millions of people.
Non-competes have always seemed dubious at best. And even where they do exist, they have expiration dates.
Unless it is in the contract you signed when you were hired. This type of stipulations exist in many different sectors.
Non-competes are illegal to enforce in California. Undoubtedly the majority of these employees were terminated in, and re-hired in Cali… if these employees even exist.
I’m interested to see more details of this come out. It’ll be interesting to see a high profile challenge to that law, if that’s what he’s attempting.
I mean if you signed a work contract that says exactly that, it would work… I don’t think there’s a distinction based on how the contract is terminated.
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.
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.
They are allowed to legally.
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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.
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.
Yeah, I would also go looking for a job that fits my experience if I was fired too. Dude played himself on this one.
And Musk fired them without due cause and didn’t give them their severance. Soooooo what’s the issue?
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The free market is great!
No, not like that!
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…
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.
The claim by Meta that “they don’t have any Ex-Twitter employees working on Threads” is just the icing on the Schadenfreude cake.
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.
I honestly wish both platforms just die
While I never really loved twitter, I do think at one time it was useful to many, so it’s a setback that it’s being gutted. But at this point I think it’s best that it’s put out of its misery and replaced with mastodon. People need to get on a system that can’t be bought by a billionaire and ruined.
It was useful. Mainly because a number of professionals were there (maybe still are, idk)
In addition, many trusted companies (at least from the infosec world) were present.
