Twitter Employee Explains Why Threads App Poses a Real Threat to Elon Musk

This Twitter engineer is "looking forward to the challenge" of competing with Meta's Threads.

Jul 7, 2023 - 02:30

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Twitter Employee Explains Why Threads App Poses a Real Threat to Elon Musk

Mark Zuckerberg launched Meta's (META) - Get Free Report response to Twitter Thursday, a text-based platform called Threads that garnered more than 30 million users as of Thursday morning. For context, it took Twitter 780 days to reach its first 10 million users, a milestone that took Facebook 852 days to reach.

Even with the success of the social media giant's latest release, the company's launch day was riddled with drama as Elon Musk's Twitter filed a cease-and-desist letter against Meta, claiming the company poached former Twitter employees in order to create a Twitter "copycat."

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As some, like Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, claim that the one Twitter component that can't be copied is its community, some analysts have raised their price targets for Meta. Justin Patterson, a media analyst for KeyBanc Capital Markets, said that, if Threads is able to incite enough of a mass migration from Twitter, the app stands to earn $6.7 billion in revenue, according to Forbes.

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And while Musk said that "competition is fine, cheating is not," one of his employees, Aqueel Miqdad, a staff software engineer, thinks that Twitter might be facing some serious competition when it comes to Threads.

"I have no doubt Threads will be the best competitor to Twitter yet," Miqdad tweeted. "We will learn a lot from them, they will get some things right. There will be new ideas. And finally, bring it on! I am looking forward to the challenge. We will be heads down building the everything app and making Twitter the best place for public conversation on the internet no matter what’s out there."

Meta's stock, which is up 143% for the year so far, hit a 52-week high July 5 in anticipation of the release of Threads. It fell throughout Thursday, closing the day at $291.99 and proceeded to fall another 1.3% in after-hours trading.

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