Substack to Elon Musk critics: Don't work for us

UPDATE: Response from Substack VP of communications, Lulu Cheng Meservey below.

Substack wants everyone to know it is a brave bastion of free speech welcome to anyone with an opinion and a desire to express it — but if you don’t like Elon Musk, you can kindly fuck off.

The message, expressed in a tweet on Tuesday by Substack’s VP of Communications, Lulu Cheng Meservey, comes after the online media landscape’s recent massive shakeup that saw Elon Musk gobble up nearly 10 percent of Twitter’s shares before being appointed to its board of directors. It could (and should) be argued that Musk — the world’s richest man, regular Department of Defense contractor, and purveyor of transphobic edgelord memes — egregiously committed securities fraud in doing so, seeing as how he cheekily polled his 80 million followers about potentially starting a new social media platform barely two weeks after quietly buying $3 billion worth of stock in Twitter. The purchase only last week became widespread public knowledge.

Regardless, anyone concerned about this and any other potential fallout from allowing the Silicon Valley huckster a major say in how much gas should be poured onto Twitter’s already blazing dumpster fire is most certainly not welcome in Substack’s offices, according to the company’s VP of communications yesterday afternoon.

A bold marketing move — “Substack is hiring!” Meservey tweeted out yesterday, before stipulating: “If you’re a Twitter employee who’s considering resigning because you’re worried about Elon Musk pushing for less regulated speech... please do not come work here.” Merservey immediately followed up by making sure people knew that, “But for everyone else, we really are hiring!... Long live independent publishing.”

Way to tell it like it is, Meservey! A mere six hours later, Substack’s VP of Communications added that “Context collapse has now happened,” seemingly implying that all the Technoking and “free speech” haters out there totally cherry-picked parts of what she tweeted about not applying to work for Substack if you are leery of giving the billionaire who shitposted about fistfighting a genocidal war criminal a major say in a social media app that’s as broken as it is popular.

Can’t wait to see how Substack’s latest free speech campaign pans out in the coming weeks.

Substack hits the edit button — A few hours following publication, we received the following email clarification from Substack’s PR team attributed to Meservey:

"It was a lighthearted poke at Twitter, but of course we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and with a wide range of beliefs and opinions, because diversity is strength. But working at Substack only makes sense if you support the ideas relating to our core mission, including that what you read matters, that writers do important work and deserve to be paid well for it, and that healthy discourse needs to allow for respectful disagreement. If that’s you please check out Substack.com/jobs!"

You hear that, everyone? It was just a “lighthearted poke!” Feel free to apply to Substack’s many job opportunities, just make sure you “support the ideas” related to the “core mission” including a commitment “healthy discourse” and “respectful disagreement” — which, when combined with “free speech,” forms the Holy Trinity for the Church of the Overton Window.