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When I see every new weekly imbroglio he's involved with, I'm reminded of the chat logs that were unveiled in court proceedings: https://jusgu.github.io/elon-musks-texts/

Something very telling was his affectation when talking with Parag. Often with Parag he would use a line like "brb have to go work on rocket science", he wouldn't say any such thing with other people. Point is, the guy is being fake here and all of this hand-waving just betrays his insecurity and fear that he doesn't have a handle on twitter.

Does someone have an idea who is who in these conversations? They all seem to be of a certain type.

> In fact you can't even search for the word substack

I found this hard to believe so I tested it, and it's true... if you search for "substack" on Twitter you find instances of the word "newsletter". It's both hilarious and sad.

same result if you search for "@substackinc"

Even better, if you search for "substacc" or other mispellings of substack, the search actually autocorrects it to "substack" and works correctly.

> if Musk just believes his target audience will happily swallow nonsense and so has no need to make up plausible lies

Yes. See the replies/QTs/RTs from his fans, and see politics for other examples of this phenomenon.

Also, the news media will dutifully repeat and spread lies even while "debunking" them.

Hilariously, if you searched for "substack" but misspelled it you would get an autocorrected search with the correct results (that is, results containing "substack").

I believe the lies are the point. The more his supporters swallow one lie, the more invested they get. The fabrication and fantasy of it all becomes part of the thrill of the narrative. Then he tells lies that are increasingly more absurd and obvious. The reality denying is the point and proof of unwavering fealty.

To play devil's advocate, they could be scraping Twitter although I don't know why they would. IP address could be short for IP ranges belonging to them, and the domains are blocked according to DNS lookups that map to those ranges.

Pretty clearly though this is just a major Streisand effect in the making.

I mean, yeah, they could be. Except:

1) Doing that wouldn't be fairly described as "downloading Twitters database".

2) Given the scale of Twitter, there's no way that would be fairly described as downloading a "massive portion" of Twitter.

3) As you say, there's no reason they would be doing that. It's certainly not needed (or even helpful) for launching something like Substack Notes.

4) Just as a matter of how networking and modern cloud architectures work, it would be a bit surprising if the IP ranges that scraping requests were made from would be the same as the ones serving up content on Substack's frontend. It could happen I suppose, but...it'd be weird, even if you weren't trying to make the requests from unrelated IPs (which...you probably would try and do).

5) Elements of the block have nothing to do with IP addresses or domain names at all, eg, the block on results when even searching for the word "substack" (but hilariously, not when searching for common mispellings), or the block on searching for posts authored by Taibbi.

6) Substack has denied doing any such thing, and frankly, their credibility is currently significantly higher than Musk's.

It's certainly possible Substack was doing something akin to scraping which via a game of telephone ended up as Musk's claim, but... I wouldn't bet money on it.

Agree 100%. There is a way to construe Musk’s statement into one that sort of makes technical sense, but only by creating a ridiculously unlikely scenario.

Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that.

If I were Musk and wanted to stop Substack I’d try some kind of long-game embrace, extend, extinguish strategy and pretend to support them at this stage.

Yeah. Like, steelmanning the argument here:

1) Musk has come out in favour of shadowbanning, or "freedom of speach, not freedom of reach", as he once put it. Twitter isn't stopping you from tweeting a link to Substack, it's just sharply limiting the ways people might see that tweet, and trying to scare people away from following it if they do see it. Which in the most technical sense is arguably not blocking links to Substack.

2) It's possible Substack was scraping Twitter. Or much more likely, they've said they were using the Twitter API to embed tweets into newsletters. That's a perfectly allowed and legitimate use of the API, but it's possible some bug on Substack's side may have made the requests look odd or happen at an unusually high rate. Or alternatively, Twitter has made major changes to how the API works recently, and we know they have a skeleton crew these days. Perhaps (due to bugs or lack of resources) they incorrectly flagged Substack's API usage as malicious. If Musk saw a report that (rightly or wrongly) suggested Substack was misuing the API to embed Tweets, he might have assumed that they were using the API to scrape Twitter.

3) Taibbi isn't an employee of Substack, but he has a Substack and paying subscribers, and thus has a very slight financial interest in the health of the Substack platform. (Only slight because Substack makes it quite easy to migrate off their platform, taking your paying subscribers with you.) But that's still more financial interest than people who aren't Musk have in the health of Twitter. So if you squint, Taibbi could almost be seen as biased against Twitter in any conflict with Substack?

So sure, I can almost find a way to imagine Musk's claims as "technically true but intentionally misleading", "almost certainly false but perhaps Musk wasn't intentionally lying", and "Musk had to know he was lying, but perhaps he was morally very slightly correct". But boy do you have to work hard to force his statements into even that ambiguously positive a frame. :)

> Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that.

Totally agreed. There's been a flurry of Twitter competitors, but Musk's actions so far have catapulted Substack's Notes into the forefront, which is hilarious for a product from comparatively tiny company that hasn't even launched yet. Spoutible and Post.news have to consider this little spat an existential disaster for them.

> (or even tweets made by Taibbi!)

And thus the whirlygig of time brings in his revenges…