Elon Musk Wanted to Buy Substack After Twitter Purchase: Report

Elon Musk reportedly wanted to buy Substack after he purchased Twitter to combine the two sites.
The tech CEO proposed the acquisition of the blogging site during a phone call with Substack executive Chris Best in April 2023, a year after he took over Twitter, according to The New York Times.
Musk reportedly saw acquiring Substack, which relies heavily on subscription models, as a way to aid Twitter’s subscription service, which Musk was pushing heavily at the time in the form of Twitter Blue.
According to the report, Best declined any notion of an acquisition despite Musk offering him a chief executive position at the combined company. Not long after the conversation, Substack pivoted into politics.
Newsweek reached out to Substack via email and Elon Musk via Tesla for comment.
Twitter, now known as X after Musk’s rebrand, has often been billed as the “digital town square.” Musk himself has described his motivations for buying the site in 2022 as political in nature. He has said that X should be a place for free speech, prompting him to unblock President-elect Donald Trump from the site despite his ban in 2021.
Substack has continued to grow in the political sphere. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie reportedly said that he wanted the race to be “the Substack election,” and he may have gotten his wish.
Some of the largest election pundits found their home on Substack for the campaign. The addition of top pollster Nate Silver to the site after his departure from ABC and FiveThirtyEight was a huge boon for the site. Substack takes 10 percent of its subscriptions as profit.
Searches for various Substack accounts boomed significantly in the final weeks of the election race, with political commentators benefitting the most. With these commentators departing traditional news outlets for Substack at a pivotal point in the news cycle, Substack successfully cemented itself as a place for alternative political dialogue—a space Musk was also gunning for with his Twitter rebrand.
X was not the only company making moves to be more similar to other players in the industry. In 2023, Substack launched a Notes feature, allowing its contributors to send quick thoughts and messages to their audiences. Musk was quick to brand this feature as a “Twitter clone.”
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