Elon Musk and one of his “Twitter Files” writers, Matt Taibbi, don’t seem to be on good terms right now, and that situation probably isn’t improving after Musk posted and deleted a DM conversation between the two. .
Let me try to recap how we got to this point. I warn you now that it is a bit complicated.
Those DMs are now deleted, but we saved them, if you want to take a look:
Image: Elon Musk, in a now-deleted tweet
Image: Elon Musk, in a now-deleted tweet
Musk, in what appears to be a Signal chat, asks Taibbi, “Are you employed at Substack?” Taibbi explains that he is paid by his subscribers and that he was one of the first “Substack Pro” writers, which were given an advance payment for one year in exchange for giving Substack 85 percent of the subscription revenue. Taibbi also asks if Twitter will fix a problem where threads were being deleted from their Twitter archives, and Musk says that will happen.
You can see where the DMs were removed. walking this thread or from the tweet below, where Musk claims that Substack was “illegally downloading large amounts of data to pre-populate its Twitter clone.” (Better denied a similar claim over the weekend.)
Ultimately, DMs aren’t all that lewd. But it’s a worrying sign that Musk, the most followed person on Twitter, is willing to post what Taibbi likely expected to be private conversations. It’s also a curious wrinkle in Musk’s stated goal of encrypting Twitter DMs. Encryption isn’t that useful to anyone who DMs him if he could post a screenshot of the conversation anyway. On the other hand, it would mean that even the owner of Twitter can’t just look at his private messages to get material for his next thread.
