Elon Musk and one of his “Twitter Files” writers, Matt Taibbi, doesn’t seem to be on very good terms at the momentand that situation probably isn’t getting any better after Musk posted and then deleted a DM conversation between the two of them.
Let me try to recap how we got here. I warn you now that it’s a bit of a mess.
These DMs are now deleted, but we recorded them, if you want to watch:
Image: Elon Musk, in a now-deleted tweet
Image: Elon Musk, in a now-deleted tweet
Musk, in what appears to be a Report Chat, asks Taibbi: “Are you employed at Substack?” Taibbi explains that his subscribers pay him and that he was one of the first “Substack Pro” writers, who were received an initial payment for a year in exchange for giving Substack 85% of subscription revenue. Taibbi also asks if Twitter will fix an issue where his Twitter Files have been deleted, and Musk says that will happen.
You can see where the DMs have been deleted scrolling this thread or from the tweet below, where Musk claims that Substack was “illegally downloading large amounts of data to pre-populate his Twitter clone.” (Best denied a similar claim during the weekend.)
In the end, DMs aren’t that salacious. But it’s a worrying sign that Musk, most followed person on twitter, is ready to post what Taibbi probably expected to be private conversations. It’s also a curious wrinkle on Musk’s stated goal of encrypt twitter DMs. Encryption isn’t as useful for someone DMing it if they can just post a screenshot of the conversation anyway. On the other hand, that would mean that even the owner of Twitter can’t just peek into your private messages to grab material for his next thread.