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

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lawsuit-meta-hiring-former-staff-elon-musk-fired-employees-2023-7?amp=

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.

104 comments

Seigest

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I love how companies can be like "you can't have those people they belong to me". And that's somehow normal.

Alignnugent

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That's how corporations view us peasants. As their property that they are entitled too.

KevonLooney

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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.

sjatar

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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 👿

Animoscity

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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.

Toribor

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Workers must choose which eccentric billionaire-run media platform to pledge their loyalty to, then they must never work in their chosen field again.

biscuit

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Feels very American to me.

CaptObvious

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Permanently Deleted

iusearchbtw

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assassin_aragorn

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Man, who could've predicted that this would age very poorly?

Everyone, you say?

CobaltLion

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Oopsie-daisy, eh?

phillycodehound

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That didn't age well

gmmxle

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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.

diskmaster23

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Woops!

sneezy

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* sad trombone noises *

creamatine

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God he is such a cunt

S_204

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Yes we fired them! No we didn't pay their severances!

But also.... MINE.

Elon is such a pathetic twat.

phillycodehound

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He's such a fucking cry baby

gmmxle

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Also forced them into arbitration, then refused to arbitrate the dispute.

MustrumR

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"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.

TwilightVulpine

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It is ridiculous for any company to claim they are entitled to the knowhow of professionals they fired.

fidodo

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Non compete clauses are illegal in California.

It's dumb that they're not illegal everywhere but Twitter and Facebook are both located there.

CoderKat

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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).

assassin_aragorn

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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.

circuitfarmer

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I simultaneously want Threads to fuck off and also decimate Musk's Twitter. But ultimately I want both to fail.

pedro

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If they could double KO in the process that would be nice

Squiglet

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Let them eat eachother out

Steeve

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That was definitely a choice of words

UnknownQuantity

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Coming soon to pornhub near you!

Squiglet

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Someone make a Midjourney image of this!

FlyingSquid

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Yeah, I'm on the outside hoping a gas leak takes out the entire stadium.

jetsetdorito

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

nobodyspecial

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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.

gornar

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You can take the man out of the emerald mine, but you can't take the emerald mine out of the man!

fuzzywombat

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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/

ghariksforge

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This confirms what everybody has been saying: this letter is just a PR stunt.

p03locke

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Elon Musk's entire existence is a PR stunt. After all, they already fired their marketing department.

Heldenhirn

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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.

assassin_aragorn

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Yeah that's the best case scenario I think. I do want it to crush Twitter though.

S_204

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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.

digdilem

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Permanently Deleted

breakingcups

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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.

UnknownQuantity

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To follow up: he got fired from PayPal before it was named PayPal. Another words: he never worked at PayPal.

Steeve

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Even better, he built a shitty banking website (X.com) that merged with the company that owned PayPal, they kicked him out of the CEO position the same year, and later they claimed to have rewritten everything Musk wrote. They rebranded as PayPal, one of their products, the following year and Musk had nothing to do with it other than sitting on the board because he got super lucky in the dot com bubble.

Heldenhirn

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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

Bardfinn

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Elon got an entire generation of redneck Republicans interested in electric vehicles. He accomplished more than any of the annoying climate doomers who stand in the road or glue themselves to things.

mojo

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Zuck and Meta are massive pieces of garbage but seeing Elon get owned where it hurts is hilarious lol

BrainisfineIthink

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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....

BrudderAaron

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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.

mojo

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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.

BrainisfineIthink

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Was it though? The Metaverse may have been an unsuccessful venture but it was a pretty successful rebrand. Facebook was getting dragged through the shitter (100% deserved), and while nobody seems to give a shot about meta, you do hear less and less about Facebook from just about everywhere. Zuck somehow managed to distance himself from his cancer of a product without shutting it down in any way shape or form just by changing the name of his company to a dud product.

That's savvy, even if it wasn't the profit factory outcome he wanted. By comparison, Elon is speedrunning driving the ONLY real competition Facebook has right into a brick wall.

pyrosive

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People have been ripping on Zuck for the past 4+ years about his investment in the metaverse...

Zima

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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.

UdeRecife

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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...

Anomandaris

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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.

Nollij

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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.

Paralda

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I believe Meta commented that they had no former Twitter engineers on the Threads team

Blatheringman

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So Elon is just talking out of his butt again...color me shocked...

Nollij

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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.

PlasmaDistortion

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Personally I am enjoying watching these 2 idiots go after each other.

ForgetReddit

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Zuckerberg isn’t going after anyone lol. Elon is having a petulant breakdown as per usual

Aftermath6187

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Zuckerberg is going after Elongated Muskrat by creating Threads and taking advantage of Twitters weakness.

skellener

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

AllonzeeLV

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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.

gmmxle

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People always call this a market failure while willfully ignoring that whenever markets are left unchecked, this is the inevitable outcome.

AllonzeeLV

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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.

Caligvla

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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?

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever

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Please avoid using ableist slurs as insults.

Mock musk for owing his entire life to apartheid and emerald mines. Mock him for being so insecure in his own body that the mere mention of his hairplugs set him off

But don't use ableist slurs that just shit on others.

Rhynoplaz

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He's surprised because he told his managers to "kill half the staff." They assumed he meant lay them off.

gmmxle

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"Sure, the service I'm offering is shitty - but don't you dare to give people a choice by offering a slightly less shitty, competing service!!"

Salvo

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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.”

jonne

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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.

Salvo

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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.

jonne

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I never liked that the supposed public square on the internet was in private hands, it should've always been a protocol like Usenet or Mastodon where anyone could spin up a server and participate.