Twitter vs Threads: Elon Musk reacts, says “competition is fine, cheating is not”
Elon Musk has responded to the recent cease-and-desist letter that was sent to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta (the parent company of Facebook).
The letter accuses Meta of violating Twitter’s intellectual property rights through the introduction of Threads.
Following his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, Musk has threatened legal action against Meta regarding the Threads app. This action was initiated through a cease-and-desist letter sent by Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, to Zuckerberg.
Threads, also known as the “Twitter Killer,” has gained significant traction since its launch on Thursday, accumulating more than 30 million downloads within the first 18 hours.
The app allows users to share text, links, and engage in conversations by replying to or reposting messages from other users.
Reacting to a report about the cease-and-desist letter on Thursday, Musk stated in a tweet that “Competition is fine, cheating is not,”, and viewed Threads, Meta’s new suite of social networking applications, as an attempt to monopolise the social media space.
Meta made a calculated maneuver by introducing Threads, a fresh platform that garnered more than 30 million registrations. Meta’s ambitious endeavor seeks to rival Musk’s Twitter by leveraging Instagram’s extensive user community, which boasts billions of engaged users.
According to Reuters, Threads claimed the number one spot among free apps on Apple’s App Store in the United Kingdom and the United States on Thursday.
Nonetheless, Musk expressed his perspective on the recent Threads launch. In response, he retweeted an image that juxtaposed the Threads logo with a tapeworm, accompanied by the remark, “Metaphorically too”
He also expressed disappointment with Meta’s launch of the Threads app, viewing it as an attempt to monopolise the social media space.
Twitter, on the other hand, has threatened to sue Meta for “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation” of its trade secrets and intellectual property, as well as data scraping.
Twitter “intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” according to attorney Spiro.
Spiro also claimed that Meta recruited former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
He claimed that Meta assigned these employees to work on the Threads app with the intention of using Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property to speed up the development of Meta’s competing app. This alleged action would violate state and federal laws, as well as the ongoing obligations of these employees to Twitter.
In response to these accusations, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone refuted the claim, stating that no former Twitter employees were involved in the Threads team.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.” Stone said.
