UPDATED with report of lawyer’s letter: Actual fisticuffs between longtime tech industry rivals Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have recently become a looming possibility. Now, Musk could be expanding the conflict to the courtroom.
Hours after Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms launched Threads, a new service billed as a “Twitter killer,” a lawyer for the Musk-owned service sent Meta a pointedly constructed letter. It blasted Threads as a “copycat” based on improperly obtained “trade secrets.”
Semafor was the first to report the legal broadside, which the outlet described as a sign that Threads is “the most serious rival yet to Musk’s chaotic, but still-central, platform.”
Quinn Emanuel attorney Alex Spiro wrote in the letter that Twitter “intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information.”
Initial word of the legal saber-rattling followed a tweet by Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino claiming the company is “often imitated” but “can never be duplicated.”
EARLIER:
As Twitter faces a significant new challenge from Instagram offshoot Threads, CEO Linda Yaccarino is defending her turf.
As was her wont while heading advertising sales for NBCUniversal, Yaccarino clapped back after Threads received generally positive response to its Wednesday launch and quickly gained scale.
“We’re often imitated — but the Twitter community can never be duplicated,” Yaccarino tweeted, without naming any specific imitators. Unlike her occasionally sharp-elbowed digs delivered on the stage of Radio City Music Hall, however, the exec’s message was more of a bouquet-toss to users than a poke at rivals. “On Twitter, everyone’s voice matters,” she wrote. “Whether you’re here to watch history unfold, discover REAL-TIME information all over the world, share your opinions, or learn about others — on Twitter YOU can be real. YOU built the Twitter community. And that’s irreplaceable.”
Repeating a term often used by Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last fall for $44 billion, she told users the platform “is your public square.”
Threads went live on Wednesday evening, earlier than expected. The app was built “for sharing text updates and joining public conversations,” according to an official blog post accompanying the launch. Posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos and videos up to 5 minutes in length. Because of the already-massive reach of Instagram and the fact that users can log into Threads via their existing Instagram account, Threads rapidly attracted millions of users in its initial hours of availability. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reported it had topped 30 million sign-ups as of Thursday morning.
“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Initial reactions and reviews have been mixed-to-positive for Threads, with some noting certain core functionality from Twitter (character count, edit button, etc.) is not yet featured. Still, a prevailing theme has been the sense that Threads is a throwback to a more organic stage of social media and far more robust than other Twitter alternatives like Mastodon or Bluesky. Musk-era Twitter has been criticized by advertisers and users for its instability, alterations to its main feed, clumsy user verification rollout and rollbacks of content moderation. Just recently, Musk had to play defense yet again after imposing a deeply unpopular limit on the number of tweets that users who don’t pay for verification can see.
Yaccarino officially took over as CEO of Twitter last month, after the news of her appointment leaked on the eve of NBCU’s annual May upfront presentation to advertisers at Radio City.
Here is Yaccarino’s tweet: