In late 2022, long before multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk renamed Twitter to X, rumors swirled that he was getting ready to shake up the platform’s verification system.
His proposal: charge each subscriber for the privilege of being verified without ever doing the homework of actually verifying their identity — a short-sighted and ultimately disastrous decision that Musk reportedly regretted almost immediately.
As detailed in an upcoming book titled “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger lay out in detail how Musk’s blue checkmark scheme, called Twitter Blue, collapsed in on itself and compounded the company’s financial crisis. (The pair recently published a story adapted from their new book in the New York Times.)
The 2022 US midterm elections took place on November 8, a day before Musk started charging users for a blue checkmark.
When the switch was made, all hell broke loose, with countless newly verified accounts masquerading as politicians, celebrities, and companies. One account parading as Nintendo shared a viral image of Super Mario giving the finger.
Advertisers, who had gotten wind of the mayhem, started reaching out to Twitter’s sales teams, threatening to pull their ads. According to Mac and Conger’s sources, Nike executives threatened to never advertise on the platform again.
And Musk was terrified of the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
“Turn it off,” he reportedly told an engineer. “Turn it off!”
Twitter Blue, a $8-a-month subscription service, was unlikely to stem all the bleeding. The company was already dealing with considerable debt. Musk had to borrow around $13 billion for his doomed $44 billion acquisition.
And business hasn’t exactly looked up since Twitter Blue launched just under two years ago. Even more advertisers have abandoned the platform over Musk’s failure to reign in a tidal wave of disinformation and hate speech — something he’s been actively contributing to himself.
Just last week, the Wall Street Journal called the acquisition the “worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis,” with banks unable to offload their debt without incurring major losses.
Musk has bounced back and forth between telling advertisers to literally “fuck” themselves and begging them to return. Earlier this month, Musk sued a global advertising alliance out of existence, accusing it of conspiring against him.
Twitter has also gone through several rounds of mass layoffs, with Musk imploring them to come back weeks later.
In short, Musk’s ill-informed takeover has left a major hole in his reputation as a successful entrepreneur. His incompetency when it comes to running a social media platform has been on full display.
Meanwhile, X-formerly-Twitter is still rife with impersonators and scammers taking advantage of Musk’s poorly thought-out Twitter Blue scheme.
And engineers could only helplessly watch as the billionaire brought down the walls around them.
“It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible,” one Blue worker wrote in a journal, as quoted by Mac and Conger.
One account parading as Nintendo shared a viral image of Super Mario giving the finger.
Legend.
Fuck-a-you Elon Muska! Wahoo!
I remember an Italian chef ELO~N account that used to make ELO~N really, really mad.
Anyone who was paying attention the first week he took over could tell he was an incompetent moron. Unending sympathy to the tweeps he didn’t immediately fire, I can’t imagine
“Let that sink in. Get it? Get it? Laugh! LAUGH BECAUSE YOUR JOB DEPENDS ON IT! DEMON MODE APPROACHES!”
More like Elon sinking twitter amiright?
If he had any sauce at all the line for that stunt would have been “mods are asleep post sinks”
If
had a sense of humor he’d do a lot less clownish shit, such as buying Twitter just so he could post on Twitter again after being so unfunny as a tiresome edgelord that he got his ass banned in the first place.Imagine if, somehow, in some almost impossible to imagine alternate universe, that
was a billionaire and owned Twitter and didn’t change anything and just kept doing dril tweets.
I say just the way he was forced by legal action to go through with the purchase because he couldn’t stop himself from shit talking was a red flag.
The whole thing was a mess, dumb ass tried to weasel his way out so many times
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It was that or face the SEC for swvurities fraud. He was trying to blatantly pump and dump twitter, got caught red handed, and dogured he could pretend to want to buy it, pay a $1 billion fine for reneging, and moving on with his life.
(CW: some grotesque/disturbing imagery)
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
banger title
material for sure.
That was a magnificent moment, but it also hurt because it should be fucking free just as the inventor of synthetic insulin intended all along.
comments like this make me grateful of living in a country with free healthcare. i hope for you all that one day you’ll be able to overthrow that shitshow of a country that is the USA
God that was a beautiful moment, if only a couple more major fake accounts of other major companies made similar tweets and the damn stock market would have seen a crash
It feels kind of weird that folks are putting out a book about the failure of twitter given that there’s still lots of failure left in the failure tank. Books take a little while to write and publish, for sure it won’t cover the lawsuit against advertisers for no longer advertising, making likes private, failing to do a livestream with Trump, etc. Musk will also probably have to sell billions more in Tesla stock to keep the thing afloat. It’s the train that keeps on wrecking. Then again, there’s certainly enough material for a book, so maybe this is the start of a series.
In any case, it’s nice that the whole thing has gone as badly as we all said it would from the beginning.
I truly don’t understand why have verification without… Actually verifying the identity of the poster?? Like, sure, 8 bucks and you can pretend you’re special but then you need to actually do the work to confirm this person is who they say they are and keep other accounts from impersonating them.
I truly don’t understand why have verification without… Actually verifying the identity of the poster?? Like, sure, 8 bucks and you can pretend you’re special but then you need to actually do the work to confirm this person is who they say they are and keep other accounts from impersonating them.
went that way because he’s as much a business genius as he is an electric car genius and rocket genius and simian torture implant genius. 
He genuinely thought people would pay him for the privilege of being on his website because he surrounds himself with sycophants both on-and-offline. Musk fan boys prove this to be true because they’ll buy a shitty $3,374,892.55 aluminum death trap and thank him when it doesn’t work.
Of course, there’s the problem of everyone who was already on Twitter isn’t a muskrat. He thought celebrities and news outlets would fall in line like so many valley techbros, which is something anyone who isn’t a dipshit realized was a terrible idea.
I get that part, it’s the not actually verifying people when they pay for the verification that I don’t understand.
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Everyday he lives, I understand less about the right bare arms.
I’m so happy I never got a Twitter account. I never have and I never well. I get to hear horror stories and comedies from folks like from our beloved UlyssesT power poster extraordinaire (and annoying podcasters of various stripes and backgrounds, it’s crazy how every podcast I listen into has a Twitter report section of some sort these days). It’s also deeply not funny and genuinely upsetting how tech companies and platforms have so much unearned and undue sway on global communications. It’s cliche to say but it’s straight out of a 90’s cyberpunk graphic novel how these companies just loudly and increasingly stupid ways control how we talk online.
I make sure never to directly link to Le Epic X Dot Com The Everything App Of Free Speech (but don’t you dare say “cis!”) and borrow screenshots instead whenever possible from a third party.
It’s cliche to say but it’s straight out of a 90’s cyberpunk graphic novel how these companies just loudly and increasingly stupid ways control how we talk online.
I was there when the social engineering really became blatant before it became so commonplace that we stopped noticing it.
It started in the 90s for me with talking heads on network news needing to have water bottles present at all times when talking and to talk about how important it was to stay hyrated with EHCH TWO OOOH at all times and to make MMMMM lip smacking sounds while imprinting their insatiable craving for a Tall Vente Frappucino Mocha from this quaint place called Starbucks™.
Social networks were astroturfed into both importance and mandatory performative presence, with loaded articles in newsrags saying stuff like “WE ALL ARE ON FACEBOOK NOW. ISN’T THAT SOMETHING?!” or putting the Zucc’s fish-eyed pale and oily stare across the entire width of a TIME magazine cover.
Sometimes astroturfing feels so blatant that I can smell the petrochemicals, like when some new celebrity is coronated out of fucking nowhere and they become famous because they are famous, or when a product is explosively overmarketed and sometimes fizzles no matter what the hype wave claimed it was going to be. That happened particularly with multiple waves of VR/glasshole hype, complete with SEO faces of awe and wonder presented on every fucking image tied to such propaganda.
I make sure never to directly link to Le Epic X Dot Com The Everything App Of Free Speech (but don’t you dare say “cis!”) and borrow screenshots instead whenever possible from a third party.
Truly the hero this site needs. Thank you for your service.
. Also excellent use of Elrond.Also holup, you can’t say CIS? like cisgendered? For real?
Social networks were astroturfed into both importance and mandatory performative presence, with loaded articles in newsrags saying stuff like “WE ALL ARE ON FACEBOOK NOW. ISN’T THAT SOMETHING?!”… “Sometimes astroturfing feels so blatant that I can smell the petrochemicals… complete with SEO faces of awe and wonder presented on every fucking image tied to such propaganda.”
Exactly dude. Fuckin’ exactly!!! You can waft in that fresh manufactured consent. Some days I feel like a geezer but the NET (not just social media which people often confuse with the internet as a whole) has been radically astroturfed
.Also holup, you can’t say CIS? like cisgendered? For real?
It’s now a meme of its own, yes. Le Epic X Dot Com The Everything App Of Free Speech instantly and automatically bans people for saying “cis.” It’s such a clownishly glaring contradiction to the false promises (and not worthwhile anyway, because of how nazis and kiddie creepers immediately leap upon “free speech” pretenses to do their usual) that Le Epic Dot Com The Everything App Of Free Speech makes, but like so many of ELO~N’s lies, it’s just sort of nodded to by the credulous rubes anyway.
Elon has always been like this. He’s just a really good conman.
Can you guys please not mess with the spelling of the name of this idiot, this stop my blocklist from working as intended.
k thanks, bye
As long as his cult continues referring to him on a first name basis as if he’s a close personal buddy waiting to sprinkle tech miracles upon the faithful, I’m going to keep mocking that.
tbh you could always add a (CW: Elon) to the post title
That’s still humoring his preferred “address him by first name like he’s a personal buddy or some kind of patron saint” so if I did that I’d say “CW: Rocket Jesus” or the like.
huh okay ig
I’m honestly surprised Twitter still generates content for us. I was honestly expecting it to implode in terms of both users and the ability to service what users remained.
I usually lift off screenshots that have the actual links removed and they’re almost always for dunking purposes. For not-directly-dunkable people, I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing there.
EDIT: Fixed typo.
Leak?
Typo. Link is what I meant to say.
elon musk is a fed
