Business and Technology

Elon Musk To Sue Zuckerberg For Stealing Twitter Secrets To Create Threads

Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, has threatened to sue Meta Platforms (META.O) over its new Threads platform in a letter to Facebook parent company CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta, which started Threads on Wednesday and has more than 30 million sign-ups, hopes to compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter by using Instagram’s billions of users.

Spiro accused Meta of recruiting former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” according to news website Semafor.

“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,” Spiro wrote in the letter.

Hararelive.com has seen the letter;

“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post.

A former senior Twitter employee told Reuters they were not aware of any former staffers working on Threads, nor any senior personnel who landed at Meta at all.

Meanwhile, Twitter owner Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to a tweet citing the news.

Since Musk’s takeover of the social media platform last October, Twitter has received competition from Mastodon and Bluesky among others. Threads’ user interface, however, resembles the microblogging platform.

To press a trade secret theft claim against Meta, Twitter would need much more detail than what is in the letter, said intellectual property law experts including Stanford law professor Mark Lemley.

“The mere hiring of former Twitter employees (who Twitter itself laid off or drove away) and the fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site is unlikely to support a trade secrets claim,” he said.

Jeanne Fromer, a professor at New York University, said companies alleging trade secret theft must show they made reasonable efforts to protect their corporate secrets. Cases often revolve around secure systems that were circumvented in some way.

The newest challenge to Twitter follows a series of chaotic decisions that have alienated both users and advertisers, including Musk’s latest move to limit the number of tweets users can read per day.

Reporting by Akash Sriram, Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru, and by Jody Godoy and Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Josie Kao

Related Articles

Back to top button