The fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg escalated onThursday, with Twitter reportedly threatening legal action against Meta Platforms over its new Threads platform.
News website Semafor reported on Thursday that a legal letter was sent by Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro to the Facebook parent’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“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,” Spiro wrote in the letter.
Spiro, in his letter, also accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” Reuters reported, citing Semafor’s report.
Reuters said Meta and Spiro did not immediately respond to its requests for comment.
Meta, which launched Threads on Wednesday and has logged more than 30 million sign ups, looks to take on Musk’s Twitter by leveraging Instagram’s billions of users.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post.
A former senior Twitter employee told Reuters they were not aware of any former staffers working on Threads, nor any senior personnel who landed at Meta at all.
Meanwhile, Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” in response to a tweet citing the news.
Meta owns Instagram as well as Facebook.
To press a trade secret theft claim against Meta, Twitter would need much more detail than what is in the letter, said intellectual property law experts including Stanford law professor Mark Lemley.
“The mere hiring of former Twitter employees (who Twitter itself laid off or drove away) and the fact that Facebook created a somewhat similar site is unlikely to support a trade secrets claim,” Lemley told Reuters.
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