Musk accuses Meta of cheating to build Twitter rival Threads; lawsuit coming?
If Elon Musk isn't feeling nervous about the $44 billion he sunk into Twitter, he's not being honest with himself. Meta's new Twitter competitor Threads is already available in 100 countries and had signed up over 10 million users after the platform was live for only seven hours. Not that there aren't some concerns. Because Threads requires subscribers to have an Instagram account to join, deleting Threads will require the user to delete the linked Instagram account. Keep that in mind if you want to leave Threads.
With Musk obviously concerned, Twitter is turning to the courtroom in an attempt to stop Meta. A report by Semafor (via CNET) says that Alex Spiro, Musk's personal attorney, wrote Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing Meta of stealing "Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property." Musk also threw his 23 trillion cents into the conversation by tweeting, "Competition is fine, cheating is not."
The accusations made by Spiro say that Meta hired former Twitter employees and was able to get them to reveal Twitter's secrets. In his letter to Zuckerberg, the attorney noted that using these ex-Twitter employees' inside knowledge of Twitter to quickly create Threads is "in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter." It isn't known whether any of these former Twitter employees signed a non-disclosure form on their way out.
Elon Musk accuses Meta of cheating by hiring former Twitter employees to get information about the platform from them
But we do have to say that Musk might have shot himself in the foot here by laying off so many Twitter employees after buying the company. That probably gave those who received a pink slip from Musk an incentive to help Meta create Threads and crush Twitter. However, Meta communications director Andy Stone posted a Thread shooting down Spiro's accusation. Stone wrote, "To be clear: 'No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.'"
In a Thread, Meta communications director Andy Stone refutes Musk's charge
If you're an iPhone user, you can sign up for Threads by tapping on this App Store link. If you own an Android device, visit the Play Store to install Threads by tapping on this link. When creating your Threads account, you can share the same sign-in credentials you use for Instagram. We should point out that the listing for the app in both the App Store and Play Store titles the listing, "Threads, an Instagram app."
Threads is off to a great start. Will it be able to surpass Twitter? For Elon Musk, that's the $44 billion question.
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