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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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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.
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?
Poor little Musk. Dump your employees on the street and they just might be hired by your competitors.
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.
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.
Musk certainly cries like a little bitch far too often to have faith in him as CEO of 10 companies. Isn’t being CEO of 1 company a full time job?
He is a great demonstration that CEOs are overpaid douchebags who don’t really do anything. Being CEO of Tesla, spacex, neuralink, Twitter and spending hours a day jerking off as a regular user at Twitter… wtf does he do for those other companies?
- Fire people without knowing anything about the business, just for feeling powerful
- People go working for competition (it turns out employers don’t own employees for life)
- Competition is advantaged by the know how of these people
- Be mad
- Lawyers come with the idea that ex employees retained company property (because, again, you don’t own the person). Something either very stupid from Twitter to not ask for corporate equipment or blantly false
- …
- Profit (yes, he will profit anyway 🤷)
Don’t forget:
1.5. Spend a fair amount of time mocking the people you fired across interviews and social media, and suggesting their work/abilities have no value
He spent plenty of time on thr “Fuck around” path, and is unhappy where it leads.
Also I think the Meta stance is that Threads doesn’t have any former Twitter employees on staff, but who knows if that’s true.
IRC Musk also fired much of Twitter’s legal department. I wouldn’t be surprised if meta hired plenty of them too, so they know where the bodies are buried.
This isn’t the first time Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan have been involved in proceedings against Zuckerberg. I assume he’s more prepared this time around.
But Musk will likely get a settlement out of it. That’s simply how the world works. Shit floats.
Non competes aren’t worth the paper they are printed on in California.
I know, but here’s the article of the law firm Musk’s retained:
Intellectual property litigation is the firm’s largest practice area and currently has over 200 lawyers who litigate IP cases.[12] Quinn Emanuel represented the Winklevoss twins’ social network, ConnectU, in its lawsuit that accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing ideas for his own social network. The parties reached a confidential settlement, yet Quinn Emanuel later revealed the confidential settlement amount of $65 million in a firm advertisement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_Emanuel_Urquhart_%26_Sullivan
Regarding #5. Twitter was a bit of a disaster regarding asset recovery before a bunch of people got fired. They often failed to make sure assets were sent back in a timely fashion. When musk fired everyone, I’m sure that problem got really bad and that Twitter failed to send instructions or materials for asset collection. People lost access to their corporate accounts and computers, but I’m guessing Twitter didn’t bother to collect all the assets so some ex employees probably still do have laptops or monitors because they literally don’t know what to do with them. I have no idea how big of a problem that might be.
- Profit (yes, he will profit anyway 🤷)
When? Last I checked, he’s still down about 92 billion dollars.
Elmo’s Twitter fiasco is legitimately dumber than Trump running not one, but THREE casinos to bankruptcy.The way i see it, Twitter is just a PR stunt for Tesla. Now that there are better cars on the market, rational buyers will not buy Tesla any more.
He needs to shift to emotional buyers. The kind of.people that have a huge pickup even if they never use for what it is 🙂
Unfortunately his net worth has really jumped up since acquiring Twitter. He briefly went to #2 in the world, but has rebounded back to about $250B, which is where he was.
Musk will profit, but not likely in persuit of getting recompense from Meta, and from his whole Twitter excursion
Musk will never make a dime from Twitter.
