It’s no secret that Meta is launching Threads to compete against Twitter. But now Elon Musk is threatening to hit back with a lawsuit to stop the app.
On Wednesday, a lawyer for Musk sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, accusing his company of systematically stealing Twitter’s trade secret to build Threads, Semafor reports.
The letter claims Meta hired “dozens of former Twitter employees” who had access to the company’s trade secrets and other confidential information. “With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app,” the letter says.
No employees were named, but the letter alleges that many of them “improperly retained Twitter documents and electronics devices.” In addition, the letter implies the same employees violated their non-disclosure agreements with Twitter after joining Meta.
The lawyer then warns that a lawsuit is likely coming Zuckerberg’s way to stop the trade secret violations and force Meta to pay civil damages. “Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” the letter adds. “Further, Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data.”
Musk, who has laid off most of Twitter's staff, tweeted: "Competition is fine, cheating is not."
However, Meta is denying the allegations. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee —that’s just not a thing," posted company spokesperson Andy Stone.
Still, Zuckerberg has been trolling Musk in a curious way. On Wednesday, he posted a rare tweet involving the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme, suggesting he’s already well aware Threads is seen as a clone of Twitter.
That said, Zuckerberg is hoping Threads will eventually surpass Twitter in both its appeal and user base. On Thursday, Meta’s CEO posted that he’s aiming for Threads to eventually reach over 1 billion users.
“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,” Zuckerberg added, in another subtle shot at Musk. (Both tech CEOs may have the chance to fight this battle in an actual ring sometime soon.)
In the meantime, Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, posted her own tweet, dismissing Threads as a real rival. “We're often imitated —but the Twitter community can never be duplicated,” she wrote.