💥Future Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filing: Elon Musk's Twitter Inc.?💥

Plus: Pear Therapeutics Files for Chapter 11.

Source: Getty Images

No this title ⬆️ is not a belated April Fool’s joke. It’s an expression of frustration.

Those of you who are long-time readers of PETITION know how much we like to use various forms of media to tell our stories. How else do you spice up reports about lease rejections, lien challenges, and plan toggles (lol)? Oooooh, a DIP carveout!? Clear the room for the big boner!

Right.

Some of this sh*t is boring AF.

And so we’ll often use memes; we’ll use gifs; we’ll smatter emojis all over the place; we’ll drop screenshots; and we’ll embed tweets — anything and everything to ensure that your drool stays squarely in your mouth while you read about objections to, like, super-priority liens on avoidance actions.

Source: GIPHY

As we write this (Saturday night), that last one — the ability to embed tweets — looks shaky. On one attempt it works. On the next, it doesn’t.¹ On Friday, it didn’t work at all.

This is not an accident.

While we were hoping to take a few days off to rest, refresh and observe some holidays (Passover and Easter), that childish insecure f*ck Elon Musk had to go ahead and act like a retaliatory douche after, on Wednesday, our publishing platform, Substack, announced a beta “Notes” feature which, ok, fine, looks a lot like a Twitter clone (🤷‍♀️). Rather than exude confidence in (i) the platform he purchased for a jaw-dropping (and wasteful) $44b and (ii) its decade+ head start in brand and technical equity (debt?), Musk prohibited the API-linkage that permits tweet embeds. That alone seems like petty nonsense but Musk took it a step farther: he throttled the tweets of Substack publishers! The man literally put a spam warning on any tweet that included a link to a Substack-based publication — including PETITION.

This, from The Verge:

Hamish McKenzie @hamishmckenzie

Today, Twitter started blocking links to Substack. We hope this action was made in error and is only temporary. However, even if this change is not temporary, it is a reminder of why cracks are starting to show in the internet’s legacy business models.

Musk seems to be running Twitter into the ground with one stupid ad hoc decision after another. Seriously, what is the point of blocking embeds that ULTIMATELY LINK DIRECTLY BACK TO YOUR SITE WHICH REQUIRES TRAFFIC TO JUSTIFY AD SALES LOLOL YOU DUMBA$$, ELON. At this rate, good luck justifying even that marked-down valuation.

This isn’t just about Substack (even if all of this drama sparked a number of high profile writers to profess loyalty to Substack and say sayonara to Twitter).