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

Elon Musk and one among his “Twitter Recordsdata” writers, Matt Taibbi, don’t appear to be on nice phrases proper now, and that state of affairs in all probability 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 received thus far. I’m warning you now that it’s a little bit of a large number.

These DMs at the moment are 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 got an upfront fee for a 12 months in return for giving Substack 85 p.c of subscription income. Taibbi additionally asks if Twitter will repair a difficulty the place his Twitter Recordsdata threads had been being deleted, and Musk says that may occur.

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

Finally, the DMs aren’t that salacious. Nevertheless it’s a worrying signal that Musk, the most-followed particular person on Twitter, is prepared 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 will imply that even the proprietor of Twitter can’t simply peek into your non-public messages to seize materials for his subsequent thread.