What Insider’s Lopez thinks about covering Musk, Twitter suspension

Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson interviewed Linette Lopez of Business Insider about her coverage of Elon Musk and her suspension from Twitter.

Here is an excerpt:

Thor Benson

How have you been feeling about your Twitter ban?

Linette Lopez

I can’t say I’m that surprised. I did upload court documents that are publicly available. I think Elon was looking for a reason. We have a long history of not getting along. I always said I was going to leave Twitter when they turned out the lights and kicked everyone out or when I was kicked out myself, so here we are.

Thor Benson

You’ve been covering him since 2018. What’s that been like?

Linette Lopez

I started investigating [Tesla] in 2018 when I got a tip from a line worker named Martin Tripp. Elon accused him of stealing trade secrets and all of this grandiose stuff and sued him. It turned into a whole debacle. I still had sources in the company even after Marty was found out, so I continued to report on it.

Around July of 2018, I reported that Elon himself had ordered Tesla to stop doing this test called the brake and roll test. That’s a test that tests the alignment on every car at different speeds, rotating the wheels. It’s very important in automotive. No one would ever not do that test in automotive. It’s unthinkable.

He told them to stop doing it because he wanted to get the cars to the finish line. It was all arbitrary and based on whatever Elon feels. You’ll notice a pattern. He wanted 5,000 cars at this arbitrary goal, and in order to get there, he was not ashamed of cutting corners that would be unthinkable to cut in regular automotive.

I published that story, and after that Elon went on this tirade where he accused me of taking money from a hedge fund manager named Jim Chanos. He was the hedge fund manager who called that Enron was going to implode. He made up this wild fantasy online that Jim was paying me and that, as a result, I was paying Marty and other sources in the company and that’s how I was getting information.

Read more here.