Mark Zuckerberg has a track record of turning someone else’s product into his own social media platform, and Elon Musk seems a little worried that it just happened to him.
During the Thursday afternoon edition of The Pat McAfee Show, the podcast host and soon-to-be ESPN employee couldn’t stick to sports after seeing news of Musk’s legal threat to Zuckerberg.
BREAKING NEWS: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over their new app Threads#PMSLive pic.twitter.com/04ni3EVd5g
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) July 6, 2023
“We have breaking news in the technology world,” McAfee said. “Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over their new app Threads.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, went live with its new text-based social media platform Threads Wednesday evening. The app is Twitter’s latest competitor, attracting a staggering 30 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours.
With Zuckerberg’s new app being deemed a “Twitter killer,” Musk literally pushed aside calls for him to fight his social media rival in the ring and threatened to take action in the courtroom instead. In the letter addressed to Zuckerberg, Musk’s company accuses Meta of poaching former Twitter employees and violating intellectual property rights to launch the “copycat” app.
“There has been a couple companies in a couple different buckets that have hired people that were at the top of another company,” McAfee noted. “And just told them, ‘Hey, let’s run this company.’ Very standard operating procedure.”
McAfee said his show used to do an ad read for a company that promoted taking employees from Lululemon to create a better athleisure brand. The company McAfee referred to was likely Birddogs, which launched after poaching Lululemon’s head of men’s design. It’s worth noting that when Musk assumed control of Twitter last year, he began by firing a majority of the staff.
“I don’t know about the legalities of it all, if there’s non-compete clauses in all these people’s contracts and everything like that,” McAfee acknowledged. “But you can certainly see how Elon would be like, ‘This is just a basic a** one of my things that I bought for [44] billion dollars.’
“Obviously not gonna win,” McAfee claimed of Musk taking potential legal action. “This is Elon just telling the world that they think this is bull***t. I think.”
McAfee, of course, is not a legal expert. However, he’s no stranger to being sued after getting hit with a defamation lawsuit from Brett Favre earlier this year, litigation that was later dropped. While the legal merit of Musk’s gripe with Zuckerberg and Meta can undoubtedly be questioned, Thursday’s letter is at least a sign that Twitter views Threads as a legitimate threat.
