That's an ad hominem tu quoque. If what you want to do is criticize the character of people criticizing Musk, carry on. But even if the person criticizing Elon is a serial murderer and leaves the toilet seat up, the truth or falsity of any statement they make is independent of their character.
If you have some argument to make about "Twitter" doing it and not "Elon," make that argument and we can discuss it. Speaking of which:
You can believe whatever you like about whether Twitter before Elon would or wouldn't have done things like ban Elon's Jet tracking account (they didn't), Bring white supremacists and Trump back (they didn't), ban journalists using a flimsy pretext of doxxing (they didn't), fire the trust and safety team (they didn't), &c. &c.
Point being, I am not giving you opinions, I am giving you facts about how Twitter under Musk is not like Twitter pre-Musk, and these are not trivial changes.
Then you add the fact that Musk himself brags to high heaven about how HE is changing things, and to boot, people talk to him on twitter and he says he will make changes.
All these things point to Musk personally taking responsibility for Twitter's actions. If he turns this around and the company ends up being worth $250 billion (his claim), do you think the world will say "That was Twitter, not Musk?"
So why when the company shits the bed shouldn't we say "That was Musk?"
That was my argument. I don't understand where this stuff about "criticizing the character of people criticizing Musk" comes from.
What is being discussed here, however, is whether using Twitter‘a web client to post a tweet containing a link to content on Substack is “abuse of Twitter’s API.”
Elon absolutely did this, and there is no “pretending” going on.