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 Platforms Inc.
META,
+3.70%
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!”
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For its report, the Daily Beast looked at a random sample of 133 people who said on their LinkedIn profiles that they work at Twitter and found that 31 of them had Threads profiles. Of course, joining a social-media platform doesn’t necessarily mean that you favor it over another platform, and 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 is TikTok or Instagram, 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, according to TechCrunch.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has a history of copycat products including Reels, Instagram Stories and Facebook Marketplace.
Per Twitter’s new media-relations policy, the company sent MarketWatch a poop emoji when contacted for comment.
Since Musk, the CEO of Tesla
TSLA,
+0.82%
and SpaceX, purchased Twitter late last year for $44 billion — after a failed effort to back out of the deal — Twitter saw 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 surrounding changes to the platform’s verification badges, which critics say leaves Twitter open to misinformation and impersonation, and has slashed the company’s workforce by more than 80%. Twitter has also mislabeled some independent media organizations as state-affiliated media.
A leaked email from Musk earlier this year stated that Twitter was then worth less than $20 billion, or less than half what he paid for it.
See also: Meta earnings could show how AI is already paying off
Last week, Musk 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.
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