In the end yes there would be a fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg… but not in a fighting cage, but in court. Twitter issued a cease and desist letter alleging a “misappropriation” of trade secrets own by Meta with its new app, Threads.
The document, prior to a lawsuit in the event that Meta does not cease its actions, was turned over to Zuckerberg’s lawyers on July 5, one day before the official release of Threads.
“The Twitter of Meta”, as Threads is known, added 10 million downloads in its first hours. By this Thursday, the app already had 30 million records.
The microblogging network is linked to Instagram, but focusing on the texts instead of the images… just like Twitter does.
This led Musk to say: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
What does the cease and desist letter sent via Twitter to Meta by Threads say?
According to the cease and desist letter, initially disclosed by the traffic light portal, Musk’s company has “serious concerns that Meta has engaged in systematic, deliberate and illegal misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
The document states that Twitter “intends to strictly enforce your intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate action to stop using Twitter’s trade secrets or other highly confidential information.”
Elon Musk’s company points out that Meta hired “dozens of Twitter employees”, deliberately assigning them the task of “developing, in a matter of months, the Threads application, copy of Meta”.
Meta responded to the Twitter statement through its spokesperson, Andy Stone. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee, that is simply not a problem”, referring to the link between the programmers with both companies.
Elon Musk in his maze
Although Elon Musk bought Twitter last October for $44 billion, The company has seen its value greatly diminish.
Musk’s chaotic changes, including opening the doors of the platform to accounts that had been sanctioned for hate speech, in addition to the sale of the verification badge, they created uncertainty among advertisers.
Because of this, Musk stepped aside as CEO, Hiring Linda Yaccarino, Former Head of Global Publicity for NBCUniversal.
But the South African continues to make drastic decisions that affect the credibility of the company, such as limit the messages that can be seen on the network and force TweetDeck users to verify themselves on Twitter Blue, for $8 per month.