Twitter threatens to sue a brand-new rival led by Mark Zuckerberg

Threads allegedly uses trade secrets that were stolen, claim Elon Musk’s attorneys.

A Silicon Valley law firm representing Elon Musk sent Meta a cease-and-desist letter on the day Mark Zuckerberg’s company unveiled Threads, a text-based Instagram companion, accusing the app of “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter’s intellectual property, trade secrets, and data.

The letter from Quinn Emanuel lawyer Alex Spiro, dated July 5, and made public on Thursday by the outlet Semafor, is written to Zuckerberg and Meta’s chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead.

According to Spiro, Meta hired “dozens of former Twitter employees” over the course of the past year who had access to the company’s trade secrets “and other highly confidential information,” which they used to create Threads as a “copycat” app.

Twitter asks that Meta stop exploiting any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential material immediately away because it wants to vigorously enforce its intellectual property rights, according to Spiro.

Musk personally tweeted in response to news reports about the letter, saying, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

Twitter’s charges were rejected by Meta spokesman Andy Stone. He told Semafor, “No one on the Threads technical team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing.

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg introduced the program that resembles Twitter and gave users the option of transferring their entire network from Instagram, another Meta-owned platform. He said on Thursday that more than 30 million users have already registered. Due to privacy issues, the app’s release in the EU has been postponed.

Musk set temporary restrictions on how much information can be viewed on Twitter at the end of June, stating the move was intended to thwart “data scraping and system manipulation.” He also disabled reading Twitter without an account.

Federal regulators have previously investigated Meta for its propensity to acquire competitors or produce knockoff items to drive them out of business. The business, which started out as Facebook, acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Since then, it has launched Facebook Reels as a competitor to TikTok and Instagram Stories as a competitor to Snapchat.