Twitter vs. Substack: Elon Musk Unfollows Matt Taibbi of “Twitter Files” Fame in an Epic Fit of Rage

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Elon Musk’s famously temperamental persona was on full display this Good Friday weekend as a simmering covert war between Twitter and the newsletter publishing platform, Substack, came to a boil, replete with moves and countermoves worthy of a Mexican soap opera.

Over the past couple of days, a number of publishers declared that they could no longer share a Substack link on Twitter or interact with any tweet that included a link to a Substack article.

Given the fact that around 25 percent of Substack traffic comes from social media platforms, with Twitter accounting for 61 percent of this cohort, the referral degradation from Twitter is likely to have a significant impact on Substack’s traffic metric.

Apparently, the dispute centers on Substack Notes, a new Twitter-like feature that allows short-form posts akin to Tweets. It seems that the global town square is not pleased with Substack’s attempts to become a direct competitor.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. The purported bonhomie between Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk was on full display a couple of months back as the independent journalist published a hard-hitting exposè on how Twitter suppressed free speech in the pre-Musk era. Dubbed the Twitter Files, the exposè leveraged thousands of internal files to publish a series of hard-hitting threads, which dealt with Hunter Biden’s laptop controversy, how Twitter arbitrarily lowered the visibility of certain accounts, and Trump’s de-platforming saga. These threads would be religiously retweeted by Elon Musk, who conferred his full blessing to the independent journalist in this