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Things in the tech world got a whole lot spicier on Thursday afternoon when news broke that Twitter owner and innovative SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was poised to sue Mark Zuckerberg over his launch of the “copycat” public conversation app, “Threads.”
According to a letter sent by Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Musk is accusing Meta of copying Twitter’s trade secrets and “other intellectual property.”
The letter asserts that dozens of employees that formerly worked for Twitter have been hired by Meta, and as such:
“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, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”
Meta’s new “Threads” app was launched on Wednesday and has reportedly garnered roughly 10 million sign-ups so far, according to The New York Times. The platform is an open-chat environment that is quite similar to Twitter.
On his own platform, Elon Musk commented on his intent to sue Meta if they do not cease and desist, writing, “Competition is fine, cheating is not[.]”
In Spiro’s letter, he further said that Meta was “expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data.”
The letter was considered a “formal notice that Meta must preserve any documents that could be relevant to a dispute between Twitter, Meta, and/or former Twitter employees who now work for Meta.”
On Thursday, the term “Twitter Killer” facetiously trended on Twitter, referring to the launch of Threads.
However, the term was largely tongue-in-cheek. Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk remarked that Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, which directly links to Threads, would be collecting an “extreme” amount of data from users.
He noted, “The regime, Big Tech, leftwing media personalities will all push Threads hard as an alternative to Twitter, because the regime is desperate to get social media back on ‘their side’ after Musk bought Twitter. Be sure to read the fine print!”