Journalist Matt Taibbi’s decision to pull the “Twitter Files” from the eponymous platform may have raised eyebrows, but Saturday he insisted, “I was trying to protect Elon.”
One of the more recent modifications that billionaire Elon Musk made to the social media platform that he acquired last fall was to block the sharing of tweets that link to Substack articles. The decision led Taibbi to announce a change in his activity on Twitter, of which he was asked about during his appearance on “The Jimmy Dore Show.”
Fill-in host Aaron Maté commented on the “threat to Twitter” that Substack posed as he surmised of Musk, “As I understand, he wanted you to leave Substack to join Twitter and you refused to do — and by the way, the people who accuse you of doing Elon Musk’s bidding have been conspicuously silent on that, that you refused Elon Musk’s demands there. But what does this mean for the ‘Twitter Files’? And can you give us any sense of what’s coming next?”
Taibbi set forth that there would be more to come, “I wouldn’t say a lifetime, but we’ve got a lot of material. So we’re gonna report all that out as much as we can.”
With that out of the way, the journalist moved to his perspective on the perceived dispute and said, “I’m sad about it. Yeah, I had, I like Elon. I think he did a really great thing. I think there’s a misunderstanding here and it’s unfortunate. I hope he continues it with other reporters. You’d be a great choice, you know…if he decided to go that way. Um, but yeah, no, it’s unfortunate.”
“Um, and, you know, he’s indicated that he doesn’t really want — he thinks that all good things would really have to come to an end. He’s made these sort of elliptical comments about it. It’s too bad,” Taibbi continued before addressing the possibility that his choice had been a monetary one. “Just one last thing about that. You know, this whole business about me maybe going to Twitter or using the subscription service that they have…I was trying to protect Elon, actually in that situation, like my understanding of the whole thing and I was trying to communicate this to him, is that the ‘Twitter Files’ wouldn’t be taken seriously if people saw that there was any kind of financial, even theoretical financial relationship between the two of us.”
“And this had to be public, you know, that there was no, there was no kind of connection,” he expressed. “And he would…be getting lots of negative PR if I’d done that move, he would never hear the end of it.”
“But he didn’t see it that way, which is unfortunate. So but, you know, it was a good thing while it lasted. And I think we learned a lot of good stuff,” Taibbi concluded before he joked about the threat of jail time from Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) who had accused him of lying under oath because of an erroneous acronym that referenced the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) instead of the private Center for Internet Security (CIS).
The most recent edition of the ongoing “Twitter Files” was released Thursday with journalist Paul Thacker setting the stage for more exposure on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s alleged misdeeds throughout COVID.
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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