The IT Nerd

I am guessing that Elon Musk is spooked by the launch of Threads today and the fact that 10 million people signed up in a matter of hours. So spooked in fact that a lawsuit is now on being floated by Twitter:

On Wednesday, Instagram parent company Meta introduced Threads, a text-based companion to Instagram that resembles Twitter and other text-based social platforms. Just hours later, a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

“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 a letter obtained exclusively by Semafor. “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to 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 accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

He also alleged that Meta assigned those employees to develop “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.”

Here’s what Meta had to say:

A Meta source told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are baseless.

“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” the source said.

Elon is clearly running scared. He’s afraid that Meta is about to destroy him by providing an alternative to Twitter which he has spent a lot of time finding new and creative ways to kill via his own stupidity. So he’s playing the lawsuit card hoping that it scares Meta into backing off. The thing is, I am 99.9% that Meta doesn’t care about this threat. And I am also 99.9% sure that if Elon follows through on his threat, he’d lose. But it would be fun to watch Elon lose, and be humiliated in the process.

This entry was posted on July 6, 2023 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Threads, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.