My question is – what trade secrets does Twitter even have that Meta didn't already have the existing infrastructure for, or competency to build themselves (probably better)?
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.
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.
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.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
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