Elon Musk Continues His Petty Tirade Against Opponents With Unthinkable Move

Elon Musk reached entirely new levels of pettiness on Tuesday when he throttled back traffic from Twitter (X, whatever) to rival sites.

But he didn’t do the same to every site.

It appears Musk specifically targeted the New York Times, Reuters, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and Substack.

Drew Harwell of the Washington Post reported that “most other sites we tested have zero delay.”

“The company formerly known as Twitter has begun slowing the speed with which users can access links to the New York Times, Facebook and other news organizations and online competitors, a move that appears targeted at companies that have drawn the ire of owner Elon Musk,” Harwell and fellow WaPo journalist Jeremy B. Merrill reported.

The pair further went on to describe how exactly Musk and co. were slowing traffic to those sites.

“The delay affects the t.co domain, a link-shortening service that X uses to process every link posted to the website,” they wrote. Traffic is routed through the middleman service, allowing X to track — and, in this case, throttle — activity to the target website, potentially taking away traffic and ad revenue from businesses Musk personally dislikes.”

BuzzFeed’s Max Woolf previously showed that his attempts to reach the New York Times from Twitter were significantly delayed.

New York Times tech reported Mike Isaac stated that we was told last week that Musk and his team were working on the feature.

Musk’s rivalry with Meta and particularly owner Mark Zuckerberg is no secret. In fact, he challenged his billionaire rival to a cage fight. Though when Zuckerberg responded, Musk seemed to have backed away from that challenge.

But even for him, this is next-level stuff.

Twitter users were less than thrilled about the move.

Musk has not yet comments on the allegations. Though he almost assuredly will have something to say.