Elon Musk Threatens Legal Action against Meta over Threads App
Chris Daramola
Digital Marketing Specialist | SEO, Branding, & Social Media Strategist | Empowering Businesses to Achieve Digital Success
Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, has threatened to sue Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over its new text-based app Threads, which has been launched as a rival to his social media platform.
In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro accused the company of “unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” by hiring former Twitter employees to create a “copycat” app.
Threads, which was launched on Wednesday, is similar to Twitter and has been pitched by Meta bosses as a “friendly” alternative. The app is linked to a user’s Instagram account and allows them to share text posts with their followers.
The app has drawn tens of millions of users since its debut, as many people are seeking out alternatives to Twitter amid unpopular changes Musk has made to the platform since buying it last year for $44 billion.
Musk has fired half of Twitter’s workforce, scrapped the verification system and the paid-for Twitter Blue scheme, and announced that users who don’t pay for the app will be limited in how many tweets they can read a day.
According to a letter initially reported by Semafor, a news website, Spiro stated that Twitter has the intention of enforcing its intellectual property rights in a stringent manner. The letter also highlighted the company’s prerogative to pursue civil actions.
领英推荐
Spiro, in a letter initially reported by Semafor on Thursday, stated that Twitter has a firm intention to rigorously uphold its intellectual property rights. He also acknowledged the company’s entitlement to pursue civil remedies or obtain a court injunction.
He also demanded that Meta preserve documents relevant for a potential dispute between the companies and stop using any Twitter trade secrets or confidential information.
On Thursday, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone shared on Threads, stating that there are no former Twitter employees on the Threads engineering team, emphasizing that such a scenario does not exist.
Musk also responded to the reports on Twitter, writing: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
This is not the first time that Musk and Zuckerberg have clashed over their businesses. The two billionaires have also been teasing that they will face each other in a cage fight, which UFC president Dana White said would break all pay-per-view records.