Musk’s X Corp. threatens to sue Meta over Twitter “copycat” Threads

The proposed cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might never happen, but the tech titans may soon battle in a more civil arena. Musk’s X Corp., the successor company to Twitter, yesterday threatened to sue Meta over alleged intellectual property violations in Meta’s new Threads social network.

Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a letter on behalf of X Corp. to Meta CEO Zuckerberg. “Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched ‘Threads’ app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

The letter was revealed today in a Semafor article. “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted about the letter.

Spiro claims ex-Twitter employees built Threads

Spiro’s letter complains about Meta hiring some of the many workers who were laid off or resigned from Twitter in the eight months since Musk bought the company.

“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees… these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in the letter to Zuckerberg. The workers, he alleged, “owe ongoing obligations to Twitter,” and many “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.”

Since taking over in late October 2022, Musk has reduced Twitter’s staff from about 7,500 to about 1,500. Twitter is facing lawsuits from ex-employees over unpaid severance and bonuses.

Spiro’s letter claimed that Meta assigned ex-Twitter “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.”

Meta source denies allegation

Semafor quoted a Meta source as saying that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee—that’s just not a thing.” Spiro’s letter did not say which former Twitter employees are allegedly working on Threads or specify what intellectual property is allegedly being used by Meta.

We contacted Meta and Spiro about the letter today and will update this article if we get any response.

Spiro wrote that “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.” He warned that Twitter may “seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.”

Spiro also suggested that Meta is violating Twitter’s terms of service by scraping and crawling data from Twitter’s website.

“Please consider this letter a formal notice that Meta must preserve any documents that could be relevant to a dispute between Twitter, Meta, and/or former Twitter employees who now work for Meta,” Spiro wrote. That includes “all documents related to the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of these former Twitter employees, the development of Meta’s competing Threads app, and any communications between these former Twitter employees and any agent, representative, or employee or [sic] Meta.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1952029