Elon Musk accuses Threads of stealing Twitter and threatens to sue Meta

The launch of Thread is a success, which pushes Elon Musk to react. The billionaire threatened to sue Meta for stealing trade secrets.

To successfully launch Thread, did Meta resort to cheating by stealing industrial secrets from Twitter? In any case, this is the accusation made by Elon Musk and his lawyers in a letter formally sent to Meta.

Elon Musk’s karma

X Corp, the new name of Elon Musk’s company, specifically accuses Meta of recruiting many former Twitter employees to help build Threads.

Source: Twitter

Employees left behind by Elon Musk at the time of the takeover, and whom the billionaire openly mocked on the social network in November 2022 : “ I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will undoubtedly be of great use elsewhere “. He certainly didn’t think his direct competitor was going to take him at his word.

According to Twitter, these recruitments would have allowed Threads to get their hands on industrial secrets illegally and the new competitor would be breaking the law by stealing intellectual property from Twitter. Development of Threads would have taken only a few months thanks to the knowledge of former Twitter engineers. Maybe they shouldn’t have been fired if they were so valuable.

Since the $40 billion takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the platform has seen its advertising revenues drop and several players like Mastodon, Substack or Bluesky try to compete with the social network. None has really taken root, but Threads has already managed to convince 30 million users, including stars, to make the transition.

Do not allow your subscribers to be imported

The letter is not an announcement of a lawsuit, but rather a warning from Twitter’s legal team against Meta. She says Twitter reserves the right to sue in federal court if it believes Meta continues to violate its intellectual property.

The mail is above all an opportunity for Twitter to indicate in black and white that Meta does not have the right to “scrape” public data from Twitter en masse, and in particular data related to user subscriptions. Today, when registering on Threads, you can import your followers from Instagram, but many users are already asking for the possibility of importing from Twitter. It is this action that Elon Musk wants to prevent at all costs.

Twitter lawyers finally order Meta to preserve all documents related to the development of Threads and the recruitment of its former employees. These documents could be used in the event of a lawsuit and reveal certain secrets of Meta. The federal lawsuit between Microsoft and the FTC recently revealed secrets of the video game industry. Still, for the moment, these are threats from Elon Musk and nothing more.

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