One of Trump's defining characteristics is his absolute lack of loyalty to his surrogates. He is spring-loaded to betray anyone who supports him once they are no longer useful to him.
The same can be said for Xitter edgelord Elon Musk, a paranoid bully who demands absolute loyalty from others but does not offer the same in return. His latest victim: former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi.
As you'll recall, Musk invited Taibbi last year to examine selected internal correspondence between members of Twitter's policy team. Musk's goal was to show that Twitter had a cozy relationship with the Democratic Party and censored conservative Twitter users' posts at the party's request. Taibbi (and other journalists Musk corralled for his project) happily obliged by releasing selected documents in a series of tweets. (In April 2023, MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan interviewed Taibbi and forced him to concede that he'd made "multiple, unacknowledged, and glaring mistakes in his Twitter Files reporting.")
Taibbi expected that Musk would treat him well after collaborating on the Twitter Files project, but it appears that the relationship soured. Yesterday, Taibbi posted the following text message exchange he had with Musk in April:
"Elon, am I being shadowbanned?" wrote Taibbi, who'd noticed a huge dropoff in attention to his tweets.
"We went on lockdown after discovering that Substack had stolen a massive amount of our data to prepopulate their Twitter rip-off," wrote Musk. (Taibbi publishes a popular newsletter on Substack). "Looks like there is still a blanket search ban. Should be fixed by tomorrow. Going forward, tweets with Substack will not appear in For You unless it is paid advertising, just like FB/Insta/etc. They will appear in 'Following'."
The next day, an attention-starved Taibbi played his loyalty card: "Elon, I've repeatedly declined to criticize you and have nothing to do with your beef with Substack. Is there a reason why I'm being put in the middle of things? This really seems crazy."
Minutes later, Musk replied, "You are dead to me. Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack."
"This is about the Substack thing? Seriously?" asked Taibbi. But since Taibbi was dead to Musk, he received no answer.
tl;dr: "'I never thought Musk would eat MY face,' sobs journalist who voted for the Musk Eating People's Faces Party."
