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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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