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.
Musk says lots of things, few of them true, less of them provable in court. Let him burn even more of his money on an army of lawyers fighting Meta trying to prove that somebody hurt hs feelings.
this isn’t a problem. better, it’s a nice way to distract him from his bizarre, fascist crusade.
Poor little Musk. Dump your employees on the street and they just might be hired by your competitors.
Good luck enforcing that non-compete after firing 80% of your engineers Elon. I’d be really surprised if this holds any kind of water when it makes it to court.
Good luck enforcing that non-compete
Can’t even enforce it anyways because it’s not enforceable in California, where twitter is based.
Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that California isn’t always the regulatory hell-hole it’s being made out to be by pundits. Non-competes are BS and I am happy California recognises this.
Lay off more than 2/3 of your staff, you expect them all to spend their time waiting outside your office begging you to let them back, Elon?
You didn’t need them anymore at Twitter. They don’t need you now, and they won’t need any “Twitter trade secrets” to make a platform that is even a bit improved.
Musk claims a lot of things.
And sometimes those claims end up costing him $44 billion. I say let him speak.
$44 billion, so far.
- 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 🤷)
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.
- 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.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.
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 🙂
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
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.
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.
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.
Smells like the idiotic “poaching” concept in which companies think they have a right to their employees and their skills. Musk fired people like a dumbass who then found new jobs working on something they have experience in. What did he think would happen? Everybody goes back to the money their families’ emerald mines shed out?
It’s about the same as a mafia hitman screeching in court after a guilty verdict that he wants the written receipts, and murder weapons that were found in the garbage on the curb in front of his home (and used to convict him) back.
ThAt’S mY pRoPeRtY!
“Poaching”, because to them competing in the free market is bad when workers do it apparently.
Exactly. The “free market” is only a rhetorical tool that they use to trick people into believing that what is happening to them is in any way fair.
When it benefits them, they use it as a cudgel. When it doesn’t benefit them, they ignore the concept entirely (or even become hostile toward it).
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 irony. From his just-announced x.ai company website:
“We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have laid them all off. Also the threads guys were saying they had no Meta guys on their engineer team.
Imagine if Bridge Company A sued Bridge Company B, for hiring a Bridge Builder that Bridge Company A previously fired
Obviously Bridge Company A should be furious and bring the biggest lawsuit possible…
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.
My, if it isn’t the consequences of his own actions come to find Elmo again.
Musk: You’re fired … NO NOT LIKE THAT
that’s probably the most positive thing i’ve heard about threads so far. good work, elon.
Ive been using it a bit, just in case it helps bring down Twitter lol
Other people will use it regardless, so there’s really no need to subject yourself to Meta’s algorithm.
Is there much activity on Threads now?
I honestly wish both platforms just die
While I never really loved twitter, I do think at one time it was useful to many, so it’s a setback that it’s being gutted. But at this point I think it’s best that it’s put out of its misery and replaced with mastodon. People need to get on a system that can’t be bought by a billionaire and ruined.
It was useful. Mainly because a number of professionals were there (maybe still are, idk)
In addition, many trusted companies (at least from the infosec world) were present.
I wonder where Meta found all those former Twitter employees, mmmmmmh 🤔🤔🤔
Typical Elon :) The guy cheats and lies routinely but cries when someone else does it. What’s up with billionaries having no self relection whatsoever… Maybe it’s built into them and part of why they think of themselves so highly.
I would call this cheating. It’s anti-competitive behavior to prevent another company from building a product similar to yours. The irony is they never would have done it if he hadn’t destroyed twitter lol
