2y ago

Twitter accuses Meta of hiring former staff in cease-and-desist letter

www.businessinsider.com Twitter accuses Meta of hiring former staff in cease-and-desist letter

Elon Musk fired thousands of Twitter employees shortly after he purchased the company and said their talents will "be of great use elsewhere."

There's just something fucking hilarious about laying off employees, mocking them, and being sued for improperly firing them -- and then whining that your competitor hired them and that they have access to Twitter information still.

I believe this fits well under the "fuck around and find out" doctrine.

107 comments

I love how companies can be like "you can't have those people they belong to me". And that's somehow normal.
- That's how corporations view us peasants. As their property that they are entitled too.
- But it's not normal. Elon has done a terrible job with Twitter from the beginning, and this is just one more error in judgment. Twitter will lose on this point unless they can prove that these people are using "secret inside info" at Threads. Courts take a dim view of not letting people pursue their livelihood. The fact that these people were fired does not help their case.
  In America you can sue anyone for anything. This is probably just something the lawyer's added to their actual lawsuit regarding IP. Threads does look and act kind of like Twitter, but you can't patent a message board.
  
  Secret insider info is that the twitter servers are burning and the remaining employees are probably just fucking around to see how they can get Elon into his demon mode 👿
  
  I also read yesterday metas statement on this and the threads team doesn’t have any previous Twitter employees. They all work on other teams. Such a problematic world we live in.
- Workers must choose which eccentric billionaire-run media platform to pledge their loyalty to, then they must never work in their chosen field again.
- Feels very American to me.
- We expected anything else from the man whose inherited wealth was literally produced by slaves? He’s incapable of considering “employees” anything but property.

- Man, who could've predicted that this would age very poorly?
  Everyone, you say?
  
  Oopsie-daisy, eh?
- That didn't age well
  
  I love how this statement is dripping with condescension for the people who built the service he's currently driving into the ground - all while thinking of himself as some kind of super genius.
- Woops!
- sad trombone noises
- God he is such a cunt

Yes we fired them! No we didn't pay their severances!
But also.... MINE.
Elon is such a pathetic twat.
- He's such a fucking cry baby
- Also forced them into arbitration, then refused to arbitrate the dispute.

"How dare they use our abandoned slaves? Slave should stay forever loyal to their master no matter how we mistreat it. They are our property, we have all rights to their use, skills and knowledge."
If this goes anywhere, Confederacy actually won the long game.
- It is ridiculous for any company to claim they are entitled to the knowhow of professionals they fired.

Non compete clauses are illegal in California.
It's dumb that they're not illegal everywhere but Twitter and Facebook are both located there.
- They're rarely enforceable elsewhere, anyway. They usually depend on intimidating people, since they're not likely to win in court for the vast majority of cases (which is why they should be straight up illegal).
- It's fairly ridiculous. So long as they don't take company property with them from the previous employer, there really shouldn't be an issue. Patents should be more than sufficient to protect IP. If you're concerned about someone building on that patent independently, you should probably do what it takes to keep them.

I simultaneously want Threads to fuck off and also decimate Musk's Twitter. But ultimately I want both to fail.
- If they could double KO in the process that would be nice
- Let them eat eachother out
  
  That was definitely a choice of words
  
  Coming soon to pornhub near you!
- Yeah, I'm on the outside hoping a gas leak takes out the entire stadium.

I mean Elon fired so many where did he expect them to go 🥴

Elon views even previous, no longer employed workers as his slaves for life. The truly disturbing thing is he's not the only one with that mindset.
- You can take the man out of the emerald mine, but you can't take the emerald mine out of the man!

Here is an analysis of twitter's legal letter by a litigation lawyer.
tldr: letter is weak
https://davidallengreen.com/2023/07/a-close-reading-of-twitters-legal-letter-to-meta-a-guided-tour-of-a-weak-litigation-letter/
- This confirms what everybody has been saying: this letter is just a PR stunt.
  
  Elon Musk's entire existence is a PR stunt. After all, they already fired their marketing department.

To be honest I kinda want threads to crush Twitter because I despise Musk so much, a lot more than Zuckerberg. Yes, Meta is a horrible company who steals all your data but if I just look at the person behind it I would know who I would kill if I only can choose one. Threads isn't a Lemmy competitor anyway, they work so different. I think Mastodon might get an issue because sites like Mastodon/Threads/Twitter are all about getting famous people on your site and let's be real: Most famous people are not hardcore nerds, some of them might not even heard of Linux. If they can choose between Twitter itself, Twitter by Facebook , or Twitter for nerds (c'mon you know that's true at the moment) I don't know what they will choose but I DO know what they will NOT choose. I hope Twitter fails because it turns into a shit hole and threads fails because it never reaches critical mass.
- Yeah that's the best case scenario I think. I do want it to crush Twitter though.
  
  Best case scenario is threads splits off enough to take critical mass away from twitter, but not enough to get it for itself.....so they both just die off.
- Musk is not a likeable person, and I'm definitely not a fan - but he has changed the world. Not many people can say that and Reddit's distaste for him has spilled over here recently.
  Paypal - first and still biggest widely trusted online payment handler.
  Tesla - Started a ground-breaking electric car market that's changed the entire face of motorised transport, and is still the leader in the sector. Their motors and battery packs are still way ahead of anyone else.
  Starnet - Bringing low latency, high speed internet to remote locations around the globe. Even in the developed western world where other technologies have deemed it unaffordable.
  SpaceX - Seriously, who can fail to be impressed by seeing a rocket LANDING intact?
  All areas where other companies dicked around and really achieved very little through lack of vision, drive or funding.
  Yes, he's had failures (Boring Company, Twitter) and yes he's a category ten arsehole (accusing people of being paedophiles without grounds, manipulating stock prices illegally, pot smoking on live tv, having complete disregard for human beings' feelings and lives, etc etc) . Does that give him a free pass to act like a knob? Of course not, but the man has actually achieved genuinely amazing things.
  
  He didn't start either PayPal or Tesla, he got fired as PayPal CEO because it wasn't doing so hot and he paid his way into Tesla to be able to call himself founder. He's not the genius. He's the guy who started with money to throw around, did so to make even more money and put his face on the poster and started to drink his own coolaid.
  
  But isn't it debatable which impact Elon had on his companies? Elon is someone who is reaching for the stars (literally) and that's the one thing he is good at. Believing he can achieve things so incredible unrealistic no one else would try to achieve them. And yes someone with a vision is important but Musk didn't invent any of the tech his companies are producing. His employees do the heavy lifting and he doesn't treat them exactly great for it.
  But the thing is all the things I just mentioned don't even really matter because It's completely irrelevant wether a person does good things while being an asshole to everyone around him. If someone is an asshole I will call him an asshole. But I admit that some parts of my comment were hyperbolic

Zuck and Meta are massive pieces of garbage but seeing Elon get owned where it hurts is hilarious lol
- I've heard Zuck called a lot of names. A LOT of them, most of them well deserved and fitting...but I've not heard very many people call him stupid or bad at his job.
  Elon on the other hand....
  
  The thing is, Zuck doesn't have a rabid fan base who licks the shit he drops as he walks. Zuck sucks but he keeps to himself and his business most of the time. Elon on the other hand has a huge rabid fanbase who treat him like he's the messiah reincarnate. Which makes it all the more satisfying when Elon loses over Zuck. Seeing Zuck doing something and failing just makes me shrug and say "He deserved it." Elon, on the other hand, I REVEL in seeing his stupidity bite him in the ass again and again.
  
  Idk, the whole meta thing he went all in on was bit of a bad call. But other then that I agree. They definitely won in the VR space and were very smart to go cordless standalone and affordable. Too bad the underlying network is invasive as hell.
  
  People have been ripping on Zuck for the past 4+ years about his investment in the metaverse...

this is the same guy that says that wfh is unethical. he clearly sees workers as his serfs since he feels entitled to their work even after firing them.

Let me try to see if I get the logic here. So a company fires a lot of people, and then another company hires them.
These workers then are leveraged by the new company to do something similar to what they have been doing in the previous company. This allows the new company to create a competing product that seems to capture part of the previous company's market.
But now the first company wants to sue the second company for... leveraging those recently dismissed workers?
One of those companies seem to be acting in a very strategically sound way, and it's not the one which fired those workers in the first place...

The simple fact that they are former employees is meaningless. This is especially true in California (i.e. where Twitter HQ is, and presumably most of these employees) where non-competes are nearly completely unenforceable. Twitter will have to specifically show that it's about their internal trade secrets, and not just the general experience they brought from their time at Twitter.
But right now, it's entirely Twitter doing the talking. We haven't seen yet how Meta will respond. I predict there is a 0% chance that Threads gets shutdown any time soon.
If you read the actual letter, it seems to paint a slightly different picture. They vaguely order Meta to stop using twitters trade secrets (whatever that may be), and serve notice to preserve communications. That's fairly normal. But then they have an entire tangent about scraping Twitter's publicly available data.
- I believe Meta commented that they had no former Twitter engineers on the Threads team
  
  So Elon is just talking out of his butt again...color me shocked...
  
  Thank you, I hadn't seen that yet. Assuming it's true, that's going to make their claims very hard to prove. It might even get dismissed.

Interesting, isn't it? When you have a problem with Twitter they send you a poop emoji, but when Twitter has a problem they fire off a cease-and-desist within hours. Elon is the perfect capitalist.

Personally I am enjoying watching these 2 idiots go after each other.
- Zuckerberg isn’t going after anyone lol. Elon is having a petulant breakdown as per usual
  
  Zuckerberg is going after Elongated Muskrat by creating Threads and taking advantage of Twitters weakness.

LOL!! Someone doesn’t like free market capitalism! LOL!!

Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing capitalists (not to be confused with the capitalism sycophant, self-hating peasants that don't hold significant capital and never will but call themselves capitalists) despise more than actual competition.
The goal of unchecked, unregulated capitalism is to end capitalism, ie competition.
That's why entire industries merge into a single entity to create a monopoly, as the regulators the oligarchs captured decades ago that were supposed to prevent such anticompetitive behaviors sit back passively with their rubber stamps.
- People always call this a market failure while willfully ignoring that whenever markets are left unchecked, this is the inevitable outcome.
  
  Due explicitly to market behavior unless regulated otherwise, exactly. Most people who build companies do so to make money. When you accumulate enough capital/power, it just becomes good business to use that power to cannibalize your competition if you're able.
  What is good for modern business, profit exclusively, becomes explicitly detrimental to the society that provided the infrastructure and conditions for that business to succeed in the first place, which is why such behaviors need to be but are not prohibited.
  At this point, our society exists to grow our beloved economy, when the reality is an economy is supposed to just be a lowly tool to better distribute goods and services for the benefit of society and it's citizens.
  https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html
  Most stakeholders of American society, its citizens, are not meaningfully among the shareholders our society labors to benefit. The most maddening part are all the exploited Americans who would literally die defending the current system and their own exploitation and that of their family in the name of tradition/blind faith/sunk cost fallacy/the schadenfreude of "I suffered so you should too"/ etc.

Wait, so Elon doesn't want the people he fired, but he also doesn't like it when they move to the competition? Is this guy fucking ret*rded or something?
- He's surprised because he told his managers to "kill half the staff." They assumed he meant lay them off.

The cream on top of this cherry is that Meta claim that they don’t have any ex-twitter employees.
“Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are baseless. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said.”
- It's kind of weird that Musk assumes there's anything special about Twitter that you couldn't build in a few weeks with a competent dev team.
  The only value Twitter has/had is its user base. There's no patents or intellectual property that can be sold off if they lose that.
  
  Yes, It is definitely a case of taking US$44 billion and throwing it away. But it is worse than that, because Twitter was a resource for the internet community.
  And his attempts to make money after the fact are as pathetic as a World Leader using his position to spruik tins of beans.
  It is almost like some sort of performance art.

Elon didn’t need any extra help running Twitter into the ground, but it’s already too late to put the genie back in the bottle, Threads is already going to take over, and it’s honestly 1 solid update with added features away from absolutely decimating Twitter.
I would’ve preferred more people migrate to Mastadon, but that’s over, any momentum that may have had will be sucked away by Threads until they screw up, hopefully by then Mastadon will be in a better position to capitalize on user dissent.
- Mastadon was never going to be mainstream, really, it required too much activation effort from people who are used to everything being streamlined and now are expected to start over. Threads can immediately port over any Instagram user and everything they already do, there is little to no barrier for entry.
  Services from non-tech giants are only going to appeal to people willing to put the effort in to remove themselves from those company's clutches. Which isn't most people.
- Threads is federated. So even if Threads absolutely takes over the microblogging market, that doesn’t kill Mastodon. Instead it guarantees the long term viability of Mastodon.
  At least that is my naive hope.
  
  That hope is indeed naive. If you want to see what threat Threads poses, look at how Google killed XMPP.
  
  Agree that's my hope, that it takes the whole idea of the Fediverse into the mainstream, and that it will live on no matter what happens to Mastodon.
  
  It's difficult to predict what will happen, but that's my hope as well. I'm going to wait and see what happens with threads federation before making any decisions.
- One solid update, and a good desktop version of Threads and Twitter is done for, especially if a Threads API comes out and third party devs make apps as well.

Musk is being an immature crybaby again, but there's a certain pattern of Facebook/Meta hiring execs who used to work on competing products only to gain an insight perspective on their competitors' plans by milking them for insider information.
They did the same when Google+ launched.

I feel like I'm watching Mean Girls but will billionaires and lawyers
- I disagree. Regina George would have them at her mercy because she was a genius and not just a random dude pretending to be.

How dare you hire the people I fired and made fun of jobs and put them on a similar site and put me out of business

This is the funniest thing I’ve read in ages. Bring on the cage fight!!

They should have just had all the tech workers they made redundant lobotomised then, I guess.
- Don't give them ideas. They are evil enough, and the system corrupted enough for them to actually do that.
  
  It's all in the contract... in the event of termination, Twitter reserves the right to perform electroshock therapy on you in your exit interview until your memory of this employment is removed. It's boilerplate.

I'm starting to think this guy's not really a genius.
j/k I never thought that.

The former genius known as Elon.

107 comments