Twitter is threatening legal action against Meta, the parent company of Instagram, over its new text-based platform called Threads, Semafor has reported.
Alex Spiro, Twitter owner Elon Musk’s personal lawyer, sent a letter to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of poaching dozens of former employees and using Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property to create a “copycat” application, according to a copy of the email viewed by Semafor. Spiro demanded that Meta immediately stop using Twitter’s confidential information.
Threads, which launched Wednesday and has skyrocketed to 30 million profiles and 95 million posts overnight, according to the Verge, is already a significant competitor to Twitter, benefiting from Meta’s resources and access to a large user base through Instagram.
Twitter is accusing Meta of several things, including poaching/stealing employees to copy their platform
Here is the full letter: pic.twitter.com/XDCtO3Sx2u— Dexerto (@Dexerto) July 6, 2023
Spiro’s letter is part of an ongoing exchange of jabs between Musk and Zuckerberg, which kicked off when Musk tweeted about being up for a “cage fight” with Zuckerberg, who responded by sharing a screenshot of the tweet with the caption “send me location.”
The idea of the billionaire boxing match arose after an internal Meta meeting obtained by the Verge was published, where Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox discussed Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, being “sanely run.”
Representatives for Twitter and Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s requests for comment.