This news could needle Elon Musk: It seems his employees are joining the millions flocking to rival Meta’s buzzworthy new app — which looks a lot like Twitter.
Meta PlatformsInc.
META,
recently launched its new Threads social media platform, and has reportedly amassed 107 million users in just its first week, which would make it the fastest-growing app in history.
As the user count for Threads continues to rise, even employees at social-media rival Twitter appear to have joined, according to a new report from The Daily Beast. And it looks like some of them are loving it.
“[Not gonna lie] the signup flow was really nice,” one Twitter staffer posted about registering their Threads account.
“I’m going to get fired for this, but I work at Twitter right now and have never really used it. Threads is just better,” another Twitter employee wrote on Threads last week. “Here’s to a new world!”
The Daily Beast report took a random sample of 133 people who said they work at Twitter on their LinkedIn profiles, and found that 31 of them had Threads profiles. Of course, joining a social platform doesn’t necessarily mean that you favor it over another platform, as some Twitter employees could simply be joining Threads to scope out the competition.
While there are dozens of social media platforms, Threads is viewed as a more direct rival to Twitter than TikTok or Instagram, for example, because it’s text-based instead of video- or image-based. Other text-based social media platforms have debuted since Twitter’s inception including Bluesky and Mastodon, but neither has gained as much traction as Threads — Mastodon claimed more than 13 million users as of Thursday, and the invite-only Bluesky has been downloaded about 375,000 times, per TechCrunch.
The company formerly known as Facebook has a history of copycat products including Reels, Instagram Stories, and Facebook Marketplace.
Per Musk’s new media-relations policy, Twitter sent MarketWatch a poop emoji when we reached out for a comment.
Since the Tesla
TSLA,
and SpaceX CEO purchased Twitter late last year for $44 billion (after failing in an effort to back out of the deal), Twitter has seen its revenue drop roughly 40% on a year-over-year basis as of December, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk has also stirred controversies at Twitter surrounding its removal of verification badges, which critics say leaves Twitter open to misinformation and impersonation. It has also mislabeled some media organizations as “state-affiliated media” and slashed the company’s workforce by more than 80%.
A leaked Musk email earlier this year stated that Twitter was then worth less than $20 billion, or less than half of what he paid for it.
Last week, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlining “serious concerns” that Meta has engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter’s “trade secrets” with its launch of Threads. Musk referred to Meta’s Threads launch as “cheating” in a recent tweet.
Meta did not immediately return a request for comment.
“Threads reached 100 million sign ups over the weekend,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Threads Monday. “That’s mostly organic demand and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet. Can’t believe it’s only been 5 days!”
Meta’s stock moved 3.98% higher as of Wednesday afternoon, and is up 154% year-to-date.
Read on: Meta is no longer this analyst’s top internet stock pick. Here’s what’s supplanted it.
