Elon sure does love blowing shit up, doesn’t he?
He appears to have “you break it, you buy it” in reverse.
Last week, on the same day that Elon’s SpaceX dick rocket exploded only 4 minutes after launch (yeah the jokes really do wrote themselves) the guy whose cars like to spontaneously combust, also essentially - blew up Twitter. (Again).
Weeks ago, Elon announced that he was going to remove all legacy blue checks unless they subscribed to Twitter Blue for the low-low price of only $8 a month.
Everyone from LeBron & Stephen King to Mark Hamill and Bette Midler said they’d refuse to pay for the app.
But it appears that the guy with the social graces of rabid hedgehog in a balloon factory didn’t believe them.
Because when he finally did strip them away, they still weren’t paying. They were either going to proceed without a check, or in the case of Jason Alexander - the were going to leave the platform entirely.
Whoopsies.
It certainly looked as if Dollar Store Dr. Evil had fucked up. For a guy who essentially tanked an electric car company by attacking the political ideologies of those who traditionally BOUGHT those cars… it sure as shit seems like miscalculations are the rule rather than the exception.
He turned the check mark into a scarlet letter. So much so that he changed the “hateful conduct” rules to include mentioning an accounts checkmark status.
I’m just a mom in Jersey, and I’m not trying to run a bazillion dollar company, but turning the option to monetize your platform into a mark of shame seems like a pretty fucking bad business plan to me.
It seems like he figured that out kinda quickly after blue check gate got underway (and by quickly, I mean months after everyone who wasn’t washing his balls on the daily had already been telling him) that he had fucked up.
That his blue checks were worse than worthless.
And what did he do?
He began forcing it upon his loudest critics.
LeBron, King, Rather…
He was “gifting” his blue checks.
It was all so weird and so small, and honestly - kinda scary. This thin-skinned narcissist so desperately seeking his own relevance & validation was fiddling with the accounts of those who didn’t seem to ‘like him.’
Now, 3 days later and without any warning, explanation or announcement, it appears he’s forcing the check on anyone with more than 1 million followers. Even the accounts of those who have died.
For the large accounts who have their checks back, the response has been varied, everything from ‘hell no, Fuck this shit’ to ‘does this make me a bad guy now?’
This is what Elon has done to what was a fairly well established and non-controversial system. He’s denigrated it. Sullied it. Tainted its value. Made it a scarlet letter. And now he’s forcing accounts to carry his water by looking as if they are using his product. When they’re not. Hoping it will convince Ma & Pa twitter user to subscribe. When it won’t.
This fucker just can’t stop fiddling.
And the more he fiddles, the more shit he blows up.
Some business model. 👍🏻
Elon has always been prone to mercurial decisions. At Tesla he would Tweet dumb things and get himself into trouble. But the Tesla business decisions were probably forced through other decision makers which often filtered out the poor choices. As for Twitter, it's pretty clear he is the one making the decisions on his own "without the benefit of the thought process". But, like Trump, he can't allow for the public to see he made a mistake so he will continue to break Twitter at a rapid rate. You can imagine that when Twitter first came up with the blue check mark thing, there were presumably many meetings, discussions, and viewpoints that led to the decision. But Musk acted alone without any input other than his first instinct. Which shows that teams of people working together can produce something better than one lone narcissist.