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.
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.
First he fires almost all Twitter employees, some even almost without warning, and then he complains that Meta has hired them to develop Threads.
There’s no getting around it, Musk has only led to the failure of what was, in part, one of the social networks with great potential.
Well if what the guy said is true and nobody from twitter is working on it that should be exceedingly easy to prove. Elon will get creamed in court and have even less money than he did before. Let’s keep that train rolling. Dude thinks he’s fucking Jesus Christ. He’s just a little bitch boy that used daddy’s seed money and got insanely lucky with PayPal . That’s it.
People want Musk and Zuck to battle in the octagon. I want them to battle out it in court, all the way down to the last penny. It would be the greatest wealth transfer to lawyers ever.
Why not both? Imagine a cage in the courtroom and Elon and Zuck delivering testimonies between the rounds.
That could literally be a scene in Idiocracy.
I hope Zuckerberg takes Musk up on the dick-measuring contest because I want the world to know that neither of them are as well-endowed as they think they are.
TBH I think threads owes more to instagram than twitter… which makes total sense given that Meta owns both. They even share user lists… The similarity with twitter is they’re both primarily text based…
He’s just doing this to disrupt a direct competitor. He fucking hates that he cannot control the world and the internet . He fucking hates that he’s known as space Karen. He’s probably had a few dozen little bitch boy melt downs since all this twitter shit went down, and I’ll be honest, I’m fucking here for it.
Dude was making fun of the people he fired on twitter, mocking people who weren’t sure they still had a job.
I hope they took every trade secret they had.
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.”
You fired them. What were they supposed to do? Die in poverty? Have you had to work a day in your life?
Maybe he feels like some of those ancient Pharaohs who had the architects building their pyramids killed afterwards in order not to reveal anyone the inner secret passages.
Oh Musk totally wants his people to follow him into his tomb. He probably dreams of it.
The core features of Twitter aren’t rocket science, and Meta already knows how to scale. Computer science students often build tiny scale Twitter clones as a portfolio project. Another shitty take from Musk
Yeah, it’s almost comical. Facebook has more users than Twitter, more features and more content to manage. Their own product Instagram is basically a superset of Twitter afaik (I use neither though). Even if anything Musk said is true, Facebook/Meta would be fully in the right to hire engineers Twitter just fired; no-compete-clauses are illegal in their jurisdiction. I think.
How would a no compete even work in this scenario?
“I fired you but you cannot take a job in another social media company” hardly makes sense.
Musk even encouraged people he fired to work for a competitor in a post he made in November. I don’t have a link to it, but he was mocking their abilities and said that if their skills are so good, they will be welcome at another company.
Edit: found it
He really is such an f’in douche. First he fired a a ton of people because he’s cheap and is a moron who doesn’t comprehend the business he just bought… then goes around mocking them to millions of people.
Lmao hilarious. Not that I like zuck but elon’s meltdown is a sight to behold.
That’s literally what I no compete says, nonsensical as it sounds.
I had one in a contract that said I’m not allowed to work for any competitors or suppliers for 5 years. Totally unenforceable, likely illegal.
And since we regularly sent out for pizza, that means theoretically I couldn’t even work for pizza hut…
It’s understandable when you realize it’s included as boilerplate in most tech employment contracts. Very few employees outside of the Executive Suite can actually negotiate their contracts. So it would seem like employers are free to throw in whatever language they want, for everyone from the CEO down to the junior dev, and if a low level employee doesn’t like it, their only option is to not take the job.
But courts (particularly in California, where I bet most of these people are based) take a dim view of one-sided contract provisions like this. My understanding is that this language is unenforceable in California. If an employee legitimately did take confidential information or a trade secret to a competitor, that is enforceable, whether or not they left to work for that competitor. But the history of Silicon Valley is full of disgruntled techies who left a stifling job to start up the Next Big Thing. It’s in California’s best interest to encourage techies to migrate from one job to another freely (provided they still respect the confidentiality of both places)
Still, companies continue to include it, in the hopes that if they ever have to invoke it they get a sympathetic judge.
Non-competes have always seemed dubious at best. And even where they do exist, they have expiration dates.
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?
“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).
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!
They are allowed to legally.
deleted by creator
Musk: You’re fired … NO NOT LIKE THAT
The free market is great!
No, not like that!
Maybe he shouldn’t have laid them all off. Also the threads guys were saying they had no Meta guys on their engineer team.
- 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 🤷)
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.
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.
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.
When Elon fired all those people, he showed that he clearly did not care about them as either humans or as a valuable company resource.
So you fired a ton of engineers unnecessarily, and then you’re surprised and upset when they get jobs with the competition? This is literally how capitalism and Musk’s “free speech absolutism” are supposed to work.
Everything this dude says and does is in bad faith.
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.
Yeah because Twitter is something that any group of talented engineers couldn’t replicate in a year.
