Elon Musk accuses Mark Zuckerberg of cheating: Twitter vs. Threads

Twitter executive chairman Elon Musk alleged in a social media post that Meta is “cheating” over the release of Threads, a text-based social network resembling Twitter.

While Musk wrote that he is fine with competition, he made it clear that he would not tolerate cheating. The billionaire’s remarks come after Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg threatening legal action.

Competition is fine, cheating is not

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023

On July 5, Spiro wrote in the letter that Twitter has the intention to “strictly enforce its intellectual property rights.“ The firm also demanded that Meta immediately stop using Twitter’s trade secrets. 

According to Spiro’s letter, Meta hired former Twitter employees with access to confidential information, including Twitter’s trade secrets. Spiro wrote that Meta assigned these employees to develop a “copycat” application called Threads, alleging that the company used Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to speed up the development of the competitor app.

Furthermore, Spiro also highlighted that the letter serves as a formal notice to Meta to preserve any documents relevant to a dispute between Twitter and Meta, as well as former Twitter employees that Meta now employs.

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Spiro also noted that Meta is not allowed to engage in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data. The lawyer wrote that this is prohibited for any reason without the company’s prior consent.

On July 5, Meta’s new text-based social network, Threads, was released in 100 countries. The app was rolled out days after Twitter’s rate limit debacle when the social platform temporarily limited the number of posts users could read.

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