I've added 100,00 Twitter followers since Musk's bid

@Steve_Sailer has grown from 40k to 140k in 29 months.

I’m happy to say that my Twitter account (@Steve_Sailer, with an underscore — sorry about my lack of consistency in naming my various sites and accounts, such as this one, SteveSailer.Net) has grown by 100,000 followers in the 29 months since Elon Musk announced his lavish bid for Twitter in early April 2022.

Having first joined Twitter in 2010, at that point I was approaching a dozen years on Twitter, but had only 40,000 followers.

Granted, the first half dozen or so years, I’d been in a daze about how to use Twitter. I felt like I was being pelted by ping-pong balls from all directions. But by 2016 or so, I was starting to get pretty good at it. It appeared, however, that somebody at the Twitter company treated me kind of like how Stalin treated his favorite dissident writer Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita: I like you, you’re a funny guy, so I’m not going to shoot you; but I’m not going to let you thrive either.

But the week in April 2022 that Musk announced his colossal bid for Twitter (even though the deal wouldn’t close for another half of a year), my follower count started to rise at an unprecedented rate. Presumably, some shadowban and/or throttling policies limiting me were lifted by employees wanting to get in better with the future boss.

And that growth has continued ever since, so I’m now up to 140,000 and rising steadily.

So, I owe a lot to Mr. Musk.

And it’s nice that he sends out modest payments a couple of times per month to me for generating engagement on X.

On the other hand, after just three months on Substack, I make a lot more money off SteveSailer.Net than I do off @Steve_Sailer, and my Substack growth rate of paid subscribers is pleasing.

So, I’d like to primarily use Twitter to make jokes, win old arguments, and notify readers of my (and other writers’) more substantial efforts on other sites, such as Substack or my anthology Noticing.

But Musk, having paid a colossal amount for Twitter, has a different vision for X: you can checkout but you can never leave. X is to be the prime content site for the world.

That’s why I’ve been trying all sorts of curious and coy references to my Substack in my tweets, such as

From SteveSailer dot Net

in the hopes that X won’t notice.

Will I triumph in this battle of wits with the genius who made both electric cars and rocket ships vastly more affordable?

Well … maybe. Crazier things have happened, I suppose.

But if you have any tips for how best to reference my Substack on Twitter, please let me know.