UPDATE:Elon Musk has done it again. According to Mashable, less than 48 hours after he killed off the gray checkmark for verified accounts by saying, “Blue check will be the great leveler,” he has brought back the gray checkmark.
With the way that multi-billionaire and the richest man in the world Elon Musk is running Twitter, you have to wonder how he ever made Tesla the iconic company that it is. So follow this: Musk buys Twitter and fires a large number of workers. But before handing out pink slips left and right, Musk failed to realize that he would need much of the staff he laid off to implement new features that he wanted to add to Twitter.
New Twitter owner Elon Musk keeps reversing himself
Musk then tried to rehire some of the ex-Twitter workers that he had just canned. And this level of incompetence was topped by how he handled Twitter’s blue verification checkmark. The blue check used to a highly sought-after icon on the platform because it meant that users could trust that the Twitter account that they were looking at and responding to actually belonged to a celebrity, a journalist, a politician, and others with a famous name.
Elon was so desperate to derive revenue from Twitter that he immediately decided to charge $8 per month for the blue checkmark. Now, anybody with the ability to make these monthly payments could have this mark on their Twitter page. And that added to the chaos normally seen on Twitter even before Musk took over.
For example, today a fake account that pretended to be the verified Eli Lilly account, flashing a blue checkmark, tweeted that from now on, all of its insulin products would be free. Yikes! And Musk, who had decided to add gray verification check marks on the kind of accounts that used to get the blue checks, reversed himself and said that Twitter would not add these gray checkmarks at all.
And this evening, the chatter on Twitter seems to indicate that the official blue verification checkmarks are back where they started from, on verified accounts. Whoever is left at Twitter and has Musk’s ear better not stop whispering in it or else the $44 billion purchase will end up as Elon’s legacy, and that would be quite sad.
Musk tells staff that he had to sell Tesla stock to save Twitter
Oh yeah, Musk also had said that he would allow those banned from Twitter, such as former President Donald Trump, to reclaim their Twitter account. Then Mush changed his mind and said that he needed to think about it. And advertisers are reportedly leaving Twitter in droves. So perhaps it isn’t as shocking as it sounds that at an all-hands meeting on Thursday, Musk allegedly told employees that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the question.”
During the same meeting,
CNBC reports that Musk also told staff that he had to sell Tesla stock to save Twitter. And Tesla shares are in a free-fall dropping 52% this year. If Musk needs to sell Tesla stock every time Twitter is in trouble, this could cost him plenty of money. Musk also says that he wants Twitter to no longer rely on advertisers by collecting half of its revenue from subscribers. So Twitter subscribers need to be alert because they will be monetized according to the platform’s new owner.
To Elon’s way of thinking, charging $8 a month for the blue verification check mark would not only have brought in a few bucks to Twitter, it also would have stopped the racist and hate posts (which have increased since Musk took over). He told advertisers, “I don’t think having hate speech next to an ad is great. Obviously. (But the) propensity for someone to engage in hate speech if they’ve paid $8 and are risking the suspension of their account is going to be far, far less.” That might just might have been wishful thinking because no one is going to pay $8 for a checkmark on a suspended account.
Musk’s involvement with Twitter has been a mess since he first announced his $44 billion buyout. He quickly sought to back out of the transaction claiming that a large percentage of Twitter accounts were bots. And just before both sides were to battle each other in court, the deal was back on.
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