A top lawyer for Twitter owner Elon Musk says the platform has “serious concerns” that Facebook parent Meta hired “dozens of former Twitter employees” in order to build its new “copycat” Threads app — accusations that Meta denies.
In a Wednesday letter addressed to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP partner Alex Spiro, a longtime lawyer for Musk and his businesses, notified the rival tech executive that Twitter’s new parent company plans “to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights.”
Spiro asserted that in rolling out its Threads social media app, which launched Wednesday, Meta relied on the work of “dozens of former Twitter employees” who “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.”
“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app,” the letter said.
In April, Twitter was hit with a proposed class action from former employees following Musk’s $44 billion deal to take the company private.
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023In response to reports of the letter, Musk wrote in a Twitter post, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
“Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter trade secrets and other intellectual property,” Spiro wrote.
In addition to alerting the company of the prospect of a lawsuit, Spiro’s letter asserted that Meta is “expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data.”
The letter did not specify which former Twitter employees Meta had allegedly assigned to its Threads development team or what intellectual property Meta purportedly misappropriated, outside of “trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
Aggressive enforcement of intellectual property rights is a bit of a change for Musk, who in 2014 announced that his electric car company, Tesla, would open up its patents to other manufacturers interested in using its technology. As recently as last year, during an appearance on the CNBC show “Jay Leno’s Garage,” Musk declared that “patents are for the weak.”
Meta spokesman Andy Stone responded to Spiro’s claims in a post on Threads, saying that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.”
“That’s just not a thing,” Stone said.
Yeah, it’s almost comical. Facebook has more users than Twitter, more features and more content to manage. Their own product Instagram is basically a superset of Twitter afaik (I use neither though). Even if anything Musk said is true, Facebook/Meta would be fully in the right to hire engineers Twitter just fired; no-compete-clauses are illegal in their jurisdiction. I think.
How would a no compete even work in this scenario?
“I fired you but you cannot take a job in another social media company” hardly makes sense.
No competes are also non binding in California, where Twitter HQ is.
That’s literally what I no compete says, nonsensical as it sounds.
I had one in a contract that said I’m not allowed to work for any competitors or suppliers for 5 years. Totally unenforceable, likely illegal.
And since we regularly sent out for pizza, that means theoretically I couldn’t even work for pizza hut…
It’s understandable when you realize it’s included as boilerplate in most tech employment contracts. Very few employees outside of the Executive Suite can actually negotiate their contracts. So it would seem like employers are free to throw in whatever language they want, for everyone from the CEO down to the junior dev, and if a low level employee doesn’t like it, their only option is to not take the job.
But courts (particularly in California, where I bet most of these people are based) take a dim view of one-sided contract provisions like this. My understanding is that this language is unenforceable in California. If an employee legitimately did take confidential information or a trade secret to a competitor, that is enforceable, whether or not they left to work for that competitor. But the history of Silicon Valley is full of disgruntled techies who left a stifling job to start up the Next Big Thing. It’s in California’s best interest to encourage techies to migrate from one job to another freely (provided they still respect the confidentiality of both places)
Still, companies continue to include it, in the hopes that if they ever have to invoke it they get a sympathetic judge.
Musk even encouraged people he fired to work for a competitor in a post he made in November. I don’t have a link to it, but he was mocking their abilities and said that if their skills are so good, they will be welcome at another company.
Edit: found it
https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1592569305941807104#m
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592569305941807104
Lmao hilarious. Not that I like zuck but elon’s meltdown is a sight to behold.
He really is such an f’in douche. First he fired a a ton of people because he’s cheap and is a moron who doesn’t comprehend the business he just bought… then goes around mocking them to millions of people.
Non-competes have always seemed dubious at best. And even where they do exist, they have expiration dates.
Unless it is in the contract you signed when you were hired. This type of stipulations exist in many different sectors.
Non-competes are illegal to enforce in California. Undoubtedly the majority of these employees were terminated in, and re-hired in Cali… if these employees even exist.
I’m interested to see more details of this come out. It’ll be interesting to see a high profile challenge to that law, if that’s what he’s attempting.
I mean if you signed a work contract that says exactly that, it would work… I don’t think there’s a distinction based on how the contract is terminated.
Yes, Instagram has always worked on the exact same social model as Twitter (asymmetric following). It’s basically Twitter where you have to post a photo. The idea that they needed “trade secrets” to release Threads is perhaps one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard.