Twitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads app , claiming the company has infringed on Twitter's "intellectual property rights".
In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a lawyer for Twitter said the company "has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, intentional and illegal misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and intellectual property."
Meta launched Threads, a text-centric messaging app that aims to rival Twitter. The company said Threads had 30 million registrations in less than 24 hours after launch, apparently making it the most downloaded app ever.
Zuckerberg said Threads was Meta's attempt to create a "public chat app with 1 billion+ people" — an opportunity Twitter had but "didn't take advantage of."
Twitter alleges that Meta has recruited dozens of former employees over the past year, some of whom "had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information" and "many" of whom have maintained "in inappropriate” Twitter documents or electronic devices.
"Competition is ok, stealing is not," Musk tweeted on Thursday.
In response to the letter, Meta's director of communications, Andy Stone, posted in Threads that there are no engineers who have previously worked at Twitter.
