The IT Nerd

There’s never a dull moment with Elon Musk and Twitter. Yesterday was the great purge of legacy verified checkmarks from Twitter. And a lot of celebrities who were very vocal about not paying Elon $8 a month ($11 on iOS) to keep them lost their checkmarks. But some didn’t. Take this guy:

You might recall that Stephen King was one of the first celebrities to be critical of Elon’s plan to force people to pay for verification. Thus you would think that he would lose his blue checkmark. But he hasn’t appears to be paying for Twitter Blue. Except he hasn’t paid for Twitter Blue. So what’s the deal with that?

There’s a simple answer to that. Elon is paying for him, and others apparently:

So why would Elon pay for Twitter Blue on behalf of these celebrities? My guess is that he knows that without celebrities having blue checkmarks next to their name, nobody else is going spend $8 a month ($11 on iOS) to get Twitter Blue. So he’s “paying” for a few celebrities to have Twitter Blue in hope that will get the revenue stream going. Seeing as only 3% of Twitter users subscribe to Twitter Blue, he’s got a lot of work to do on that front. It also highlights the fact that Twitter Blue has been a complete failure for Elon as celebrities aren’t interested in signing up and the only people who are are those who have no Internet clout of any sort. And on top of that, he’s devalued the value the blue checkmark as well. Illustrating that he has no clue what he’s doing. And the Twitterverse didn’t hesitate to point that out:

Congratulations Elon. You’ve once again played yourself.

This entry was posted on April 21, 2023 at 9:56 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.