Elon Musk and one of his “Twitter Files” writers, Matt Taibbi, don’t seem to be on great terms right now, and that situation probably isn’t getting any better after Musk posted then deleted a DM conversation between the two of them.
Let me try to recap how we got to this point. I’m warning you now that it’s a bit of a mess.
Those DMs are now deleted, but we saved them, if you want to 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: “You are employed at Substack?” Taibbi explains that his subscribers pay him and that he was one of the first “Substack Pro” writers, who were given an upfront payment for a year in return for giving Substack 85 percent of subscription revenue. Taibbi also asks if Twitter will fix an issue where his Twitter Files threads were being deleted, and Musk says that will happen.
You can see where the DMs were removed by scrolling up this thread or from the tweet below, where Musk claims that Substack was “illegally downloading vast amounts of data to pre-populate their Twitter clone.” (Best denied a similar claim over the weekend.)
Ultimately, the DMs aren’t that salacious. But it’s a worrying sign that Musk, the most-followed person on Twitter, is willing to just post what Taibbi likely expected to be private conversations. It’s also a curious wrinkle on Musk’s stated aim to make Twitter DMs encrypted. Encryption isn’t as useful for anyone who DMs him if he might just post a screenshot of the conversation anyway. On the other hand, it would mean that even the owner of Twitter can’t just peek into your private messages to grab material for his next thread.
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