Mark Zuckerberg's Meta launched Threads, a Twitter competitor; Threads is a complete Twitter copycat, launched at a time when Twitter was a mess. Now, Musk has sent in his lawyers and is really nitpicking.

Meta claims that over 30 million people are registered on Threads (Twitter has an estimated 350 million users) and that it is a "friendlier" social media platform. I downloaded the app and found that it is basically Twitter, with people making jokes about not being on Twitter and discussing their favorite sodas. There are some differences, such as a larger character limit and no trends or hashtags, but the look and feel is pretty much the same.

So it should come as no surprise that Mask thinks there may be a legal aspect here. Semaphore reports that Twitter's chief lawyer, Alex Spiro, sent a strongly worded letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday.

"Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that immediate steps be taken to prevent Meta from using Twitter's trade secrets and other confidential information," Spiro laments. The letter further accuses Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter staffers who "had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information" and of having them create a copycat Meta app called "Threads The company is accused of having them create "Threads," a copycat application of Meta that "uses Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property.

I mention employees because there is a big problem if Twitter wants to pursue this seriously: U.S. copyright law does not protect ideas. In other words, copying Twitter is fine, but using Twitter's code to do so is a big no-no.

In response, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said on Thread, "There are no former Twitter employees on the Thread engineering team.

In other words, he would say. The interesting thing about this is that one of Musk's first actions when he took over Twitter was to lay off thousands of employees. It is not impossible that some of the staff may have since moved to Meta, but it is unclear whether Twitter is actually concerned here or just sporadically firing people in search of a landing spot.

Elon Musk responded to the legal letter's discussion by saying that competition is fine, but cheating is not good. He and Zuckerberg have been engaged in a war of words in recent weeks, including a bizarre derailment of their agreement to cage match each other, and after the launch of Threads, Zuckerberg decided to poke the bear by tweeting a meme pointing to Spiderman for the first time in 11 years.

Musk was having none of it, and with tears in his eyes, he must admit that he found the pettiness of this billionaire war somewhat amusing. Musk responded mockingly to a user posting a well-known message that Zuckerberg had sent him when he was 19 years old. He went on to make a sinister pronouncement about how Meta invisibly manipulates what people see (isn't Twitter doing this too?), agreed that the Threads logo looks like a tapeworm, replied to a joke about Threads with a crying smile emoji and here to stay:

"It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter than to bask in the false happiness of Instagram, which hides the pain," Mask blackmailed. [The more Zuckerberg speaks out in public, the angrier Mask seems to get. Of course, the real battle here is much simpler. Can Thread scale up to Twitter's level and beyond, or will it be another meta-service that fades away after a big announcement?

"We are often imitated," Linda Yaccarino, recently appointed CEO of Twitter, said yesterday." But the Twitter community can never be imitated." Yaccarino must be wondering what she signed up for when she sees these billionaire babies romping around.