Musk Accuses Meta Of IP Theft, Serves Cease And Desist As Threads Balloons To 30M Users

Chronically online billionaire Elon Musk was forced to follow through on his proposed acquisition of Twitter late last year, and the site has changed dramatically in the intervening months. That has a lot of Twitter users searching for alternative social networks, and Meta just released one. The company's Threads app is available on Android and iOS, and it rocketed to more than 30 million users in a day. This has so upset Musk and co that Twitter's legal team has threatened to sue Meta for cloning Twitter.

Threads connects to Meta's Instagram platform, giving new users a quick way to import their followed accounts. So, you'll be able to replicate many of your social circles on Threads in just a few taps. Instagram is a much larger platform with about 2 billion users, while Twitter had about 450 million users before Musk took over.

Competition is fine, cheating is not

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023

The Threads app bears a passing resemblance to Twitter, but that can be said of all the apps that have attempted to compete with it, like Gab, Parler, and Truth Social. Musk is treating Meta's new app like a major threat, directing Twitter's lawyers to send a threatening letter to Meta. The document accuses Meta of conspiring to steal Twitter's trade secrets, which sounds very serious. However, the source of this claim is that Meta has hired many former Twitter employees, but that was only an option because Musk fired so many of them.

Twitter's legal threats are being criticized harshly on both platforms, with users noting that Musk went out of his way to mock fired employees, insinuating they would not find similar jobs elsewhere. As it turns out, this claim probably doesn't have any basis in reality. According to Meta communication director Andy Stone, there are no former Twitter employees working on Threads.

How it started / How it's going pic.twitter.com/vFFQbtFGaB

— Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ (@padresj) July 6, 2023

And, of course, that makes sense—you don't need to have worked at Twitter to understand basic social media design considerations. Because that's what Threads is right now: basic. So, it's very telling that 30 million people were so anxious to ditch Twitter that they are willing to overlook the app's shortcomings. Bluesky, a Twitter competitor that has slow-rolled signups, only has about 50,000 users.