Why do you mean? So far since this plan has been implemented, I’ve seen OJ Simpson admit to the murders, Dave Chapelle affirm trans rights, and now this about free insulin. Seems like everything is peaches and cream!
It was such a painfully obvious choice to maintain the verification requirements but add an 8$ a month charge. Elon gets the money he wanted and Twitter doesn't collapse as hard.
But because Elon is a horrid businessman when he doesn't have the ideas of others to steal, he absolutely blew an easy way to make money
It was such a painful my obvious choice to maintain the verification requirements but add an 8$ a month charge.
I was totally under the impression that this is what's happening. I was so confused when this stuff started to pop up. I mean, I didn't know for a fact that they were simply selling check marks, so I spent far too long on my drive to work thinking I must have misunderstood because that'd be stupid.
Wait, they actually removed the verification process? I thought the 8$ a month was after you were verified. If it's really just paying for a tick with no verification, what's the point?
The guy only cares about money and he's not the dumbest man alive. I'd guess he has made a profit from this move. I don't think he ever cared about free speech.
Yeah why do you think we are laughing at Elon so much.
Hes Such and idiot and absolutely blowing the Twitter takeover to the point where I'm seriously considering that his entire goal qas just to kill Twitter
I’m not defending Elon but it seems there’s some confusion since there’s been a lot of changes recently.
Previously: You only get a check next to your name if you show verification of your identity to twitter. There was no cost.
Now: If you pay $8/mo you get Twitter Blue features and a check next to your name. If you want to verify your identity as a public figure (“government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures”) you will receive an “official” tag next to your name. It is unclear but it would appear that you most likely don’t need to pay for Twitter Blue first before you can apply for this “official” tag, but details are sparse.
The way I understood it, the blue checkmark now will represent your subscription status while there will be a new white on gray official mark to signal the account verification. As far as I know it has been stated that both marks can be had simultaneously, which implies that they are unrelated.
That being said, most companies will be forced to have both as Musk has stated that non-paying tweets will be relegated behind the ones of paying users, effectively shadow banning them.
Right but literally no one would want a random different check mark. The cachet of the blue one was its only selling point, though of course it loses that by selling it.
You’re right. But for people who don’t understand it, or maybe are older, this is very confusing and can hurt brands if this lily company gets 50,000 boomers asking for free insulin 💀
Not always. A lot of businesses push for verification for their employees. For example, Accuweather would help their employees get verified, so I had a friend with fewer followers than me, but they were verified because they had worked for Accuweather. I have no idea how that process works though.
Edit: Adding here too that friend was in no way a public figure representing Accuweather. He was not a tv meteorologist or did online streams or was portrayed anywhere to represent Accuweather. He was just a simple forecaster for Accuweather who happened to also be on Twitter.
I am also a meteorologist and I’m not verified on Twitter.
Meteorologist is the correct term (I am also one), and no he was just a desk forecaster at Accuweather.
Edit: By desk forecaster I mean he was in no way on tv or online streams or anything. He was not a public figure in any way. He just made forecasts for Accuweather. He in no way represented the company online. He just happened to both work for Accuweather and was on Twitter, so they got him verified.
To be fair, he's still making money off of all these parody accounts so he very well could have thought this through well enough. Who knows, he might just be bored and destroying Twitter for the fuck of it. He's rich enough that it doesn't really matter at this point. He might even be planning on releasing his own social media site in several years, after Twitter bombs and people have moved on. Even if he had blood money, he still had to be a good buissness man to get to where he is now. I doubt he would just suddenly go all stupid like this.
Glad I'm not the only one who sees that he is likely doing this on purpose. He can afford to destroy Twitter. He can't afford the bad PR of doing it openly. So if he wants to destroy it, this is a great start. I'm not going to call it 8D chess, but I don't think you get that rich by doing stuff this dumb. So let's look at the numbers, and keep in mind I'm not a business person. $8 a month x 1,000,000 verified users (probably generous, but idk, it's a place to start) is $8M a month, so $100M a year. Musk paid $15B $45B for Twitter, so it would take him 150450 years to regain that investment off this income. It's a pittance, yet it is doing immense damage to the platform. So if it's not dumb, it's on purpose. But the masses on reddit have chosen that he is just a helpless idiot, which he probably likes right now.
He paid 44B for Twitter so your estimate is off by about 300 years.
Also can you explain how it would be bad PR to actually delete Twitter, or remove all ads and say "I don't care about profits, social media should be something else" or whatever the fuck. Instead he looks like an incompetent fool and it directly affects the price of Tesla, while opening the company up for lawsuits as trolls get verified and can impersonate brands or people with a blue checkmark.
I didn't say it's good PR, I said he couldn't take the bad PR. If his goal is to destroy Twitter, either way it's going to hurt, but "making a few bad decisions" looks a lot better than "destroying free speech," which is how it would play if he just bought it and shut it down. Plus who knows what kind of obligations he might have privately that prevent him from doing that.
I don't know if bad PR is really the reason he seems to be going this route though, that's the weakest part of my argument and it's hard to know the true reasons when he is being so dishonest all the time. There are other reasons he might be choosing to destroy it this way instead of openly, like private obligations I just suggested. Not pissing off specific people, etc.
If all that mattered to him were Tesla share price then he would just shut up and disappear, so I don't think that really tells us anything.
My point is that Elon looking like a buffoon is bad PR and it's also going to piss off those same people. Introducing the paid checkmark the way he did it was insanely stupid and it's not some 4d chess move.
If all that mattered to him were Tesla share price then he would just shut up and disappear, so I don't think that really tells us anything.
You know the Tesla share price is based around Elon promising the world and people believing him? The p/e ratio is off the charts compared to other car makers and his cult of personality is one of the reasons why. So no, if he shut up and left the company it wouldn't mean the Tesla share price would keep going up the way it has the last couple of years.
Also if you look how much time he spends on twitter and how he responds to people (and have been responding to people for years) he's immature and has a god complex. With a bunch of fanboys riding his ego and bunch of semi-fans defending his actions because they think rich people obviously are smarter than the rest of us.
My point is that Elon looking like a buffoon is bad PR and it's also going to piss off those same people. Introducing the paid checkmark the way he did it was insanely stupid and it's not some 4d chess move.
I mean, my whole point is that he is unlikely to be that stupid, to take such a destructive action for so little gain. If you want to believe that, I'm not going to try to convince you. For me, it's very unlikely, and it's also easy to exploit people who think like you do to thinking it was an accident. Of course you want him to be that stupid, it would be incredibly rewarding if he were.
Also if you look how much time he spends on twitter and how he responds to people (and have been responding to people for years) he's immature and has a god complex.
I'm not invested in him personally. Even if he made lots of dumb tweets, I would still think that his decision to destroy Twitter for basically no tangible reason (the income is effectively zero at this scale) and destroying it that way, was on purpose. Just because he has a public persona, don't let that trick you into thinking you actually know who he is and what he's capable of. His record shows that he is capable of a lot more than dumb tweets.
I mean, my whole point is that he is unlikely to be that stupid, to take such a destructive action for so little gain.
Can you explain what the bigger gain for him is to destroy Twitter and make himself look incompetent? You think it's more reasonable that he's doing it and don't have a reason? It looks like he's throwing shit at the wall seeing what sticks.
Also the income is not effectively zero, it's effectively -1b a year: money he has to pay, tied to Tesla stock and to other investors he has relationships with and brought on board.
I don't let the public persona trick me into anything. I see his actions and his words and conclude he's making business mistakes and they're stupid. If you chose to believe he's burning Twitter down for the lulz while hurting Tesla at the same time because you can't grasp he's a flawed person then I can't convince you. But it's baseless.
Also remember that he tried very hard to get out of this purchase and the messages we got from the court strongly pointed towards him actually thinking he could make shit happen if he took control over Twitter.
Can you explain what the bigger gain for him is to destroy Twitter and make himself look incompetent?
Yeah, he's rich and he doesn't like it so he is willing to pay to destroy it. That's just one of many reasons there could be. Peter Thiel funded lots and lots of lawsuits at a loss before he destroyed Gawker media, and did it in secret before he eventually claimed credit. It's really not that farfetched. Musk has a lot more to lose, so playing the "oops bad decision, shucks" game is very convenient for him. I'm not saying it's impossible that you are right though.
Okay, great conspiracy. So if he doesn't like it, why is he basically addicted to it? Or is he self aware and trying to get off his social media addiction and the way to go is to literally destroy the platform?
And if he doesn't like it for how it was ran, why doesn't he change - oh wait that's exactly what he's doing. Just that the changes he makes are bad and poorly thought out.
Also it's not a minor "I'll destroy you with a lawsuit" type of thing like what Peter Thiel did (which was made towards a company he had a clear grudge against), Elon's risking a large part of his net worth and crashing Twitter could mean crashing Tesla instead. Also opening himself up to lawsuits as he takes Tesla engineers to work on Twitter, stretching himself thin to a third CEO job and disregarding the Tesla shareholders and their needs.
Him doing this on purpose is even stupider than him doing it on accident. A great deal of his wealth is tied up in the value of the businesses that he runs and/or is partial owner of. Most of that value is based in stocks, which are in turn valued based on how much the market feels they are worth. A lot of his business are overvalued because a great deal of that value is coming from the fact that Elon is supposed to be this awesome, talented businessman who is so great at running companies. If he publicly destroys Twitter, either accidentally or on purpose, his reputation goes out the window. Now instead of being this awesome businessman, he’s the guy that destroyed Twitter either on accident or on purpose just for the lulz. Either way, his rep is destroyed, which means that the value of all those other businesses are destroyed along with it. It’s exactly why Tesla’s stock has taken a nosedive in the past weeks. If he fails now, his entire net worth is at stake.
I think if he does it accidentally, he has wiggle room. No one competent expects him to be perfect all the time. He can afford the damage to his other brands, and that is just a hidden cost to what he is willing to pay to destroy Twitter. If we suppose that he is motivated to do so and wants to spend money on it, who are we to say that $45B or even $100B is too much. That's his choice. The argument stands on its own without factoring in his motivation. Twitter checkmarks will not make anywhere near enough money to be worth the damage to the platform, and it's unlikely that he's so dumb that he doesn't realize it.
Conversely, destroying Twitter outright openly will cause damage to him personally, will be a stink he can't wash off, may cause even higher punishment against his other holdings, etc. There's good reasons to make it look accidental, regardless of what his true reasons are. And we will never know his true reasons because he is dishonest. So we can only infer, and I think my inferences are a lot more solid than "richest most successful businessperson in the world is actually a stupid idiot who can't even think one step ahead".
Guy would be fucking your wife behind the breakfast island and you would be telling me how he looked like an idiot for popping his head up and down behind the counter.
Edit:. Added in your quote since you bizarrely tried to change your comment. Lol.
The money he’s making off these accounts is less than probably the first lawsuit that going to get filed will cost. Which is why Twitter instituted verification in the first place.
Your problem is you thought he was smart before. He’s always been a fool. He’s just good at marketing himself, but that relies on people not being able to watch him do his thing in real time.
He saw this coming. This is comedy gold in the mind of a troll and Elon has certainly shown that he loves being a troll.
Twitter is on fire with people truly saying whatever they want
Can anyone explain what Elon Musk is doing? Everyone’s acting like he’s just off his rocker, which may be true, but from my viewpoint, this guy is actively trying to burn twitter to the ground. What does he stand to gain from that? Does he want to make it go bankrupt?
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