Elon Musk Expands Substack Feud With Matt Taibbi
Elon Musk lashed out at journalist Matt Taibbi in response to his former Twitter Files ally’s flounced off the platform on Friday – while Taibbi expressed his confusion at the blaze.
“All I can say is that I seem to be in the middle of a business dispute,” Taibbi told The Post on Saturday.
A day after Taibbi complained to Twitter about the suppression of Substack, the subscription-based site hosting his coverage, Musk noted insisted in a tweet that the accusation is “false”.
“Substack links were never blocked” on Twitter, Musk claimed. He also said, “It turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.”
“None of this is true,” Substack co-founder Chris Best retorted in a post on the Notes platform of Substack, a Twitter rival whose upcoming launch seems to have inflamed Musk’s ire. “It’s one thing to mess with Substack, but quite another to treat authors that way.”
On Friday, Twitter began blocking “likes” and comments on tweets related to substack stories — two of the most important ways for its writers to garner attention — and tagged substack links with an “unsafe” label.
“Anyone using the product can see this,” Best wrote.
As of Saturday afternoon, the “unsafe” labels appeared to have been removed from Substack links on Twitter, the platform Musk bought for $44 billion in October — and has been trying to monetize ever since.
