Dem
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GOP
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Things are not going well for Elon Musk. His SpaceX rocket just blew up and severely damaged the launchpad on the way out and Twitter is a real mess, starting with its new blue check system. In v1.0 of Twitter, celebrities got a free blue check mark after verifying their identity. Simple enough and worked well. But after spending $44 billion to buy Twitter, Musk is now desperately trying to make it profitable, something it never has been. One brilliant idea of his was to charge anyone who wanted a blue check mark $8 a month without verifying who they were. In addition, Musk began taking away the legacy blue check marks from celebrities who had them for years. Only about 5% of them were willing it buy them back for $8/mo. Some said that since they were providing him with content, he should be paying them, not the other way around. Multiple major news organizations refused point-blank to pony up for the organization or its employees.
Dropping the verification was a bad idea. Many trolls instantly started impersonating famous people and got the check mark as soon as the $8 payment cleared. Trolls got away with impersonating New York Mayor Eric Adams and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot for a while. One troll got a verified account in the name of J.K. Rowling and apologized to the transgender community for comments made in the past.
As a business proposition, this hasn't worked at all. Not enough people signed up to generate meaningful revenue. After all, if all a blue check mark means now is that you can afford to waste $8/mo, it isn't much of a status symbol. Worse yet, some of the celebrities who have recently gotten their blue check mark back for free, don't want it anymore, since it suggests that the are forking over $8/mo to the evil Musk. Some are thinking of going further and suing Twitter to remove the unwanted check marks claiming that they imply a false endorsement of the product.
This mess is a huge black mark for Musk, who claimed his brilliant business acumen would turn Twitter around. Instead, advertisers have fled and revenue from subscriptions comes nowhere close to replacing it. He could go back to the old way, but the interest on the loans he took out to buy Twitter is about $1 billion/year so he needs money from the users, but they are apparently not interested in paying for Twitter. A lot of things on the Internet are big successes—as long as they are free. Once they start costing money, they become a lot less popular. Is there a way out for Musk? Well, he's the business genius, not us. Though we'll point out that, thanks to the Patreon subscribers, this site actually makes more money per month than Twitter does. That is something that became true the moment the first Patreon subscriber signed up. (V)