Technology @lemmy.world Mrkawfee @lemmy.world 1 yr. ago

Musk claims Meta hired dozens of Twitter employees to build Threads.

www.law360.com Musk's Atty Says Meta Hired 'Dozens' Of Ex-Twitter Employees - Law360

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.

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105 comments

First he fires almost all Twitter employees, some even almost without warning, and then he complains that Meta has hired them to develop Threads.

There's no getting around it, Musk has only led to the failure of what was, in part, one of the social networks with great potential.
Even if the former Twitter engineers were working on Threads - so what?

I have had to demonstrate relevant skills and experience for every job I’ve ever applied for (beyond junior/trainee). This is just how the world works.

It’s almost like Musk doesn’t understand how enormously normal it is to use skills and experience gained in one job when you go to the next one.

And it’s not like Twitter has special IP - it’s a fairly straightforward system; the only difficulty is scale which Meta will already know all about.
The core features of Twitter aren't rocket science, and Meta already knows how to scale. Computer science students often build tiny scale Twitter clones as a portfolio project. Another shitty take from Musk
You fired them. What were they supposed to do? Die in poverty? Have you had to work a day in your life?
They are allowed to legally.
Good luck enforcing that non-compete after firing 80% of your engineers Elon. I'd be really surprised if this holds any kind of water when it makes it to court.
When Elon fired all those people, he showed that he clearly did not care about them as either humans or as a valuable company resource.
Yeah, I would also go looking for a job that fits my experience if I was fired too. Dude played himself on this one.
And Musk fired them without due cause and didn't give them their severance. Soooooo what's the issue?
Poor little Musk. Dump your employees on the street and they just might be hired by your competitors.
The free market is great!

No, not like that!
So you fired a ton of engineers unnecessarily, and then you're surprised and upset when they get jobs with the competition? This is literally how capitalism and Musk's "free speech absolutism" are supposed to work.

Everything this dude says and does is in bad faith.
Imagine if Bridge Company A sued Bridge Company B, for hiring a Bridge Builder that Bridge Company A previously fired
Yes, because Facebook clearly has no prior experience working on a revolutionary social media platform that can only display 280 characters per post. That advanced technology is decades ahead of everybody else and would not have been doable without Twitter's IP being stolen.
Permanently Deleted
Musk certainly cries like a little bitch far too often to have faith in him as CEO of 10 companies. Isn't being CEO of 1 company a full time job?
Fire people without knowing anything about the business, just for feeling powerful

People go working for competition (it turns out employers don't own employees for life)

Competition is advantaged by the know how of these people

Be mad

Lawyers come with the idea that ex employees retained company property (because, again, you don't own the person). Something either very stupid from Twitter to not ask for corporate equipment or blantly false

...

Profit (yes, he will profit anyway 🤷)
Typical Elon :) The guy cheats and lies routinely but cries when someone else does it. What's up with billionaries having no self relection whatsoever... Maybe it's built into them and part of why they think of themselves so highly.
When musk hired ex NASA or VW employees 👍

When other companies hire ex twitter / Tesla staff 😡😤😡
Yeah because Twitter is something that any group of talented engineers couldn't replicate in a year.
Musk: You're fired ... NO NOT LIKE THAT
that's probably the most positive thing i've heard about threads so far. good work, elon.
This is stupid on so many levels but fuck it, LET THEM FIGHT
You mean the guys that ran away when you took over Twitter and made it a hellhole?
The irony. From his just-announced x.ai company website:

"We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto."
I wonder where Meta found all those former Twitter employees, mmmmmmh 🤔🤔🤔
Another crybaby move from Musk.

Even if it's true that Meta hired Ex-Twitter folks, what secrets could they possibly bring with them? A basic grasp how Twitter works conceptually? This is common knowledge. Architectural stuff? This is Meta ffs, they literally scaled FB and Instagram to billions of users.
Musk claims a lot of things.
Would those be the Twitter employees who loved where they worked and were unceremoniously fired?
Musk says lots of things, few of them true, less of them provable in court. Let him burn even more of his money on an army of lawyers fighting Meta trying to prove that somebody hurt hs feelings.

this isn't a problem. better, it's a nice way to distract him from his bizarre, fascist crusade.
Maybe he shouldn't have laid them all off. Also the threads guys were saying they had no Meta guys on their engineer team.
My, if it isn't the consequences of his own actions come to find Elmo again.
🤷 so?

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