Elon Musk Sues Mark Zuckerberg As Threads Enters Twitter’s Space In Big Tech War

Twitter has threatened to sue Meta Platforms (META.O) over its new Threads platform in a letter sent to the Facebook parent’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro.

Meta, which launched Threads on Wednesday and has logged more than 30 million sign ups, looks to take on Elon Musk’s Twitter by leveraging Instagram’s 2.3 billion strong user base.

Spiro, in his letter, accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information,” News website Semafor reported.

Meta owns Instagram as well as Facebook and WhatsApp.

Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October, the social media behemoth has seen competition from Mastodon and Bluesky among others. Threads’ user interface, however, closely resembles the microblogging platform.

Still, Threads does not support keyword searches or direct messages.

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,” he said.

Jeanne Fromer, a professor at New York University, said companies alleging trade secret theft must show they made reasonable efforts to protect their corporate secrets. Cases often revolve around secure systems that were circumvented in some way.

The newest challenge to Twitter follows a series of questionable decisions that have alienated some users and advertisers and Musk’s latest move to limit the number of tweets users can see per day has added fuel to the fire.