Elon Musk has responded to the recent “cease and desist” letter sent to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook. The letter says that with the start of Threads, Meta has violated Twitter’s intellectual property rights.
In a “cease and desist” letter to Zuckerberg, Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, said that if Meta didn’t stop making the new Threads app, Musk would sue them. Musk took over Twitter in October 2022.
The Threads app, which has been called the “Twitter Killer,” has been downloaded more than 30 million times in the 18 hours since it came out on Thursday. Users can share text, links, and participate in chats by responding to or reposting other users’ messages.
In a tweet on Thursday, Musk responded to a story about the cease-and-desist letter by saying, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” He also said that Threads, Meta’s new suite of social networking apps, was an attempt to take over the social media space.
When Threads, a new platform with more than 30 million sign-ups, was released, Meta made a smart move. Meta’s big plan is to fight with Musk’s Twitter by taking advantage of Instagram’s huge user base of billions of daily users.
Reuters says that Threads was the most popular free app on Apple’s App Store in the US and UK on Thursday.
But Musk has said what he thinks about the start of Threads. In answer, he shared a picture that said the Threads logo looked like a tapeworm and said, “Metaphorically, too.”
He was also upset that Meta released the Threads app, which he saw as an attempt to take over the social media market.
Twitter, on the other hand, has said it might fight 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,” says attorney Spiro.
Spiro also said that Meta hired former Twitter workers who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
He said that Meta gave these employees the Threads app to work on with the intention that they would use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property to speed up the development of Meta’s competing app, which would be against state and federal law as well as the employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.
In answer to the accusations, Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, said that no former Twitter workers are part of the Threads team.
“No one on the engineering team for Threads used to work for Twitter. That’s just not a thing.” Stone said.