I don't think this is a sane take. Knowing trade secrets and being a "necessity" are not related. They were, and you are, and I am, replaceable. Our possible deep esoteric knowledge of secret sauce maybe makes the replacement more painful, but that's all. If you've ever been on the "not fired" side of a layoff, you'll understand how losing someone "vital" is almost always just a disruption, in reality. The group may even collapse, but if the work truly is non-optional, pressure will build, and it will be done. If there's any competence, nobody will miss that person in a short time, and that's a good thing.
It's like watching a supercar supercrash in superslowmotion.
The real secrets are the massive money needed to promote the network and to pay for the infrastructure, the massive social reach to attract top posters, the massive networking effect needed to make it a must-have app.
Meta already have all of those.
But do I buy that specifically Facebook could do it? Yeah, obviously they could. It's not at all surprising that Facebook could quickly launch a Twitter clone. This isn't like the "metaverse", Facebook already runs social networks that are larger and more complicated than Twitter is, and Threads looks to be highly tied into their existing infrastructure.
I could not build a Twitter clone in my free time, but I also don't currently run Instagram.
Whether they did or not is maybe the question?
The question is whether the Twitter employees actually brought and used trade secrets for this effort.
and then I'm pretty sure Elon had a whiteboard session during his first days before firing everyone and had people explain it to him. Which he then posted on his twitter account. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649?s=20
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
However I doubt that Musk has any grounds for claiming that "the most useless employees" who weren't even treated with dignity upon firing them would have transferred those to Meta illegally.
IMHO this is just Musk freaking out that the next time Twitter doesn't work as expected or asks for money, people would have real alternative to move on.
Reddit needs something similar.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone admit to major organizational failings like that. I haven't worked for a company in at least 15 years where every single bit of access I had wasn't revoked within minutes.
When I last changed jobs in 2021 I watched the Outlook app on my phone. My boss walked me out of the building at 1:00pm, took my keycard, and the app access was revoked at 1:07pm.
They are suing on the basis that someone somewhere said "when I was at twitter we used tabs not spaces in our code"
So you fire 80% of your workforce claiming they're dead weight and completely unnecessary, while simultaneously suing their new employer because apparently they were vital cogs who somehow "continue to have access to trade secrets"? So vital you're refusing to pay out any of their severance packages. Only in Elon land.