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.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_Emanuel_Urquhart_%26_Sullivan
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.
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.
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#1186adea3d78
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 🙂
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.
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.