Elon Musk keeps followers waiting after saying he'll release details about 'what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter'

• Elon Musk said Friday that he would release details on Twitter's "suppression" of a story about Hunter Biden's laptop.

• Twitter initially restricted distribution of the story, citing concerns that it could be the result of a foreign disinformation campaign.

• Musk has said making the company's internal deliberations public "is necessary to restore public trust."

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said Friday that he would release details about what he characterized as Twitter's "suppression" of a controversial story about Hunter Biden's laptop that was published before the 2020 election.

Musk also tweeted that it would be "awesome" and there would be a "live Q&A" on the topic. But he did not meet his 5 p.m. ET deadline for publication, and tweeted at 5:21 p.m., "We're double-checking some facts, so probably start live tweeting in about 40 mins."

"Where's Elon" was trending on Twitter as the delay stretched on.

The New York Post story about the laptop was published in October 2020, less than a month before the election. At the time, then Democratic candidate Joe Biden had a healthy lead over then-President Donald Trump.

The story claimed to contain emails retrieved from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden; the New York Post said it learned of the emails' existence from Trump's ex-White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and obtained the emails from Trump's personal lawyer at the time, Rudy Giuliani.

Twitter initially limited distribution of the story, citing concerns that it could be the result of a foreign disinformation campaign. But the social media company quickly backtracked on its response, with then-CEO Jack Dorsey calling the decision to block the link "unacceptable."

Other news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, later confirmed the validity of several of the laptop's contents long after the election.

Last month, Musk tweeted that releasing internal discussions about decisions regarding the story "is necessary to restore public trust."

He later tweeted that "Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections."

Musk's announcement is likely to inflame Trump, who in August demanded reinstatement as president or "a new Election, immediately" after news that Facebook temporarily limited the laptop story. Trump was responding then to comments from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook limited the story's reach on the site's news feeds for five or seven days amid questions about the content.

When Twitter's internal communications were eventually released Friday evening, they came in the form of a long tweet thread by the journalist Matt Taibbi. Much of the information contained in the emails Taibbi tweeted out confirmed what was already publicly known about Twitter's handling of the New York Post's story.

Late last month, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, told the tech journalist Kara Swisher that he and other Twitter employees were concerned that the Post's story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at damaging Joe Biden's candidacy ahead of the 2020 US election.

"We didn't know what to believe. We didn't know what was true. There was smoke," Roth said. He added that it was a mistake for the company to limit users' access to the story, saying, "ultimately for me, it didn't reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter."

The communications Taibbi published Friday depicted the internal dissent Roth alluded to in his interview with Swisher, with some senior officials advocating for a more cautious approach to the story while other employees worried that censoring the story would spark a right-wing firestorm and accusations of anti-conservative bias.

Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, asked Musk for documents about Twitter's internal deliberations in October as part of the panel's investigation into Hunter Biden's business dealings.

There is no evidence that the younger Biden's work influenced his father's policy decisions.

Comer told Insider on Thursday that Musk's tweets about Twitter's handling of the Post's story had given Republicans hope that he would provide more information to Congress.

"We're hopeful," Comer said, adding that Musk "pretty much admitted there was wrongdoing" at Twitter.

Kelsey Vlamis contributed to this story.

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