Threatening to Sue Meta over Threads, Musk’s Lawyer Sends a Letter to Zuckerberg

Meta’s Instagram recently introduced Threads, its own Twitter competition app, and the app was a huge hit on the day of its launch itself. Threads have already made more than 30 million sign-ups.

Twitter might move forward with a lawsuit to sue Meta for introducing Threads, making use of Twitter’s intellectual properties and other information by hiring Twitter’s former employees.

Competition is fine, cheating is not

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023

Twitter to Sue Meta Over Threads?

In a letter sent by Elon Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro to Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter has accused Zuckerberg of “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual properties”. The letter states that over the years, Meta has hired many former Twitter employees who had and who are still having access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other confidential information. It is making use of these collected data, that Meta’s Instagram has made its own microblogging application, Threads.

However, Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson has mentioned that no one who was on the engineering team of Threads was a Twitter employee. No former employees or senior personnel from Twitter has not joined Meta, states a former senior Twitter employee as per a report on Reuters. Whatever the case, Meta Instagram’s Threads somewhat look similar to Twitter, taken for the fact that it does not support direct messages or keyword searches. In response to a copy of the letter that has been shared on Twitter, Musk has also commented, “Competition is fine, cheating is not”.

If we take the opinions of experts who deal with such lawsuits, it is clear that Twitter’s claims, as mentioned in the letter, won’t stand a chance in suing Meta for trade secret theft. It has also been mentioned that it is the company’s responsibility to protect their own confidential data and Twitter will have to show that the required measures were taken to protect it in order to sue Meta.

We’ll have to wait to know more regarding how the matter between Musk and Zuckerberg heads and how it will be put to rest.