Elon Musk tweets, then deletes DMs from Matt Taibbi over his Substack snit

Elon Musk and considered one of his “Twitter Information” writers, Matt Taibbi, don’t appear to be on nice phrases proper now, and that state of affairs most likely isn’t getting any higher after Musk posted then deleted a DM dialog between the 2 of them.

Let me attempt to recap how we acquired so far. I’m warning you now that it’s a little bit of a multitude.

These DMs are actually deleted, however we saved them, if you wish to look:

Musk, in what seems to be a Sign chat, asks Taibbi: “You’re employed at Substack?” Taibbi explains that his subscribers pay him and that he was one of many first “Substack Professional” writers, who have been given an upfront payment for a year in return for giving Substack 85 % of subscription income. Taibbi additionally asks if Twitter will repair a problem the place his Twitter Information threads have been being deleted, and Musk says that can occur.

You’ll be able to see the place the DMs have been eliminated by scrolling up this thread or from the tweet under, the place Musk claims that Substack was “illegally downloading huge quantities of knowledge to pre-populate their Twitter clone.” (Greatest denied an analogous declare over the weekend.)

In the end, the DMs aren’t that salacious. However it’s a worrying signal that Musk, the most-followed individual on Twitter, is keen to simply submit what Taibbi seemingly anticipated to be non-public conversations. It’s additionally a curious wrinkle on Musk’s acknowledged intention to make Twitter DMs encrypted. Encryption isn’t as helpful for anybody who DMs him if he may simply submit a screenshot of the dialog anyway. Alternatively, it could imply that even the proprietor of Twitter can’t simply peek into your non-public messages to seize materials for his subsequent thread.