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.

  • zephyrvs@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Musk is being an immature crybaby again, but there’s a certain pattern of Facebook/Meta hiring execs who used to work on competing products only to gain an insight perspective on their competitors’ plans by milking them for insider information.

    They did the same when Google+ launched.

  • Salvo@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    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@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      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@aussie.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        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@infosec.pub
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

  • Heldenhirn@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • S_204@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        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@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

      • breakingcups@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Steeve@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          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@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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

  • S_204@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

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

    But also… MINE.

    Elon is such a pathetic twat.

  • Zima@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • fidodo@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    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@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      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@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • AllonzeeLV@vlemmy.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Spaceman Spiff@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • U de Recife@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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…

  • CALIGVLA@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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?

  • 7egend@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    Elon didn’t need any extra help running Twitter into the ground, but it’s already too late to put the genie back in the bottle, Threads is already going to take over, and it’s honestly 1 solid update with added features away from absolutely decimating Twitter.

    I would’ve preferred more people migrate to Mastadon, but that’s over, any momentum that may have had will be sucked away by Threads until they screw up, hopefully by then Mastadon will be in a better position to capitalize on user dissent.

    • ziggurism@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Threads is federated. So even if Threads absolutely takes over the microblogging market, that doesn’t kill Mastodon. Instead it guarantees the long term viability of Mastodon.

      At least that is my naive hope.

      • grue@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        That hope is indeed naive. If you want to see what threat Threads poses, look at how Google killed XMPP.

          • grue@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            First of all, SMTP was much more well-established before Google came along than XMPP was.

            Second, from what I’ve heard, Gmail (and other big players like Hotmail etc.) did have a substantial detrimental effect on the proverbial “little guy’s” ability to self-host email… at least if he wants outbound messages to actually be delivered instead of blocked, anyway.

      • ExcessivelySalty@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Agree that’s my hope, that it takes the whole idea of the Fediverse into the mainstream, and that it will live on no matter what happens to Mastodon.