Elon Musk accuses Mark Zuckerberg of cheating on Twitter vs. Threads.
Twitter executive chairman Elon Musk has accused Meta of “cheating” in the release of Threads, a text-based social network similar to Twitter, in a post on social media.
Musk stated that he is okay with competition but will not tolerate cheating. This statement comes after Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg threatening legal action.
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
In the letter dated July 5, Spiro stated that Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demanded that Meta immediately cease using Twitter’s trade secrets.
According to Spiro, Meta hired former Twitter employees who had access to confidential information, including Twitter’s trade secrets. He alleged that Meta assigned these employees to develop a “copycat” application called Threads, using Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to expedite the development of the competing app.
Spiro also emphasized in the letter that it serves as a formal notice to Meta to preserve any relevant documents related to the dispute between Twitter and Meta, as well as those involving former Twitter employees now employed by Meta.
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Spiro further noted that Meta is prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data without prior consent from the company.
Meta’s new text-based social network, Threads, was released in 100 countries on July 5. The launch of the app coincided with Twitter’s rate limit issue, where the social platform temporarily restricted the number of posts users could read.
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