Twitter owner Elon Musk has accused his new competitor Threads, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, of being based on “cheating”. The South African billionaire’s reaction comes at a time when Twitter already seems weakened by the newborn Meta, only a day after its creation.

Twitter threatened to sue Meta just hours after the Instagram parent company launched Threads, an app it hopes will beat out the struggling site owned by Elon Musk.

In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, published by online news outlet Semafor on Thursday, Musk lawyer Alex Spiro accused the company of “unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

The letter accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

Threads is the biggest challenger yet to Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of the world’s biggest social media platforms, despite its struggles.

Zuckerberg’s latest move against Musk further heightened the rivalry between the two multibillionaires who have even agreed to meet for hand to hand combat in a cage match.

Threads went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 2300 GMT on Wednesday, and early feedback noted its close, but scaled back, resemblance to Twitter.

Within a few hours, more than 30 million people had downloaded Threads, Zuckerberg said Thursday.

Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.

Musk meanwhile retweeted an image that said the Threads logo resembled a tapeworm. “Metaphorically too,” he added.

In another post referencing Twitter’s potential legal action against Meta, Musk noted that “competition is fine, cheating is not.”

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said on Threads: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”

Zuckerberg is taking advantage of Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter to push out the new product, which Meta hopes will become the go-to platform for celebrities, companies and politicians.

Under Musk, Twitter has seen content moderation reduced to a minimum with glitches and rash decisions scaring away celebrities and major advertisers.

He also fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, some of whom presumably went to other tech companies, including Meta.

Malo Pinatel, avec AFP