Elon Musk's Rocket Blowing Up Somehow Least Embarrassing Thing To Happen To Him This Week

Soon Twitter will be just Elon, his fanboys, and slowly rolling tumbleweeds.

The takeover of Twitter by comically jowly sex mutant Elon Musk continues its march into future business school textbooks as example number one of how to take over a multi-billion-dollar company, drive it straight into a flooded canal, and then struggle to unbuckle your seatbelt as the company sinks and people line the canal’s edge to laugh at you.

The latest fuck-up by Apartheid Karen involves the site’s infamous blue checkmarks and has put him in direct conflict with several celebrities who use Twitter, such as Stephen King and LeBron James. You know, minor cultural figures like that:

“My Twitter account says I’ve subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven’t. My Twitter account says I’ve given a phone number. I haven’t.”

— Stephen King (@Stephen King) 1682022380 

The blue checkmarks were once a useful tool for navigating the site in search of information, serving as a sort of shorthand to tell users whether the account with the CNN logo tweeting about a nuclear attack by suicide antifa terrorists was or was not the real CNN, and if not, you probably do not need to grab the baby and Mee Maw and your AR-15 and lock yourself in your fallout shelter.

But somewhere along the way, antisocial weirdos who need to get out more decided that these checkmarks were some sort of coveted status symbol, and hoo boy did they resent any “elite” journalist or celebrity who had one.

So not long ago Elon announced that anyone who paid him eight dollars a month for a Twitter Blue subscription could have this meaningless emoji on their account, a move he pitched as some sort of great equalizer for the rumpled proletariat languishing under the heel of Big Verified. Musk apparently also saw these subscriptions as a potential source of revenue, because anyone who is anyone would certainly pay a monthly fee for a false and worthless sense of belonging.

Imagine if the cool kids charged eight bucks to sit with them every day at lunch. The only people status-obsessed enough to do it would be the insecure sorts of jackasses that no one would want to be around anyway.

What has happened on Twitter, predictably, is that the legions of neo-Nazis, giant nerds, and cryptocurrency bros who would fall all over themselves praising Elon if he guillotined his own penis have ponied up, thus removing any actual service value for these stupid checkmarks to the people who had been verified under the old system. So organizations and famous people are fleeing the service , as it is now useless to them.

However, Elon, because he is a fawning and obsequious star fucker, waived the fee and did not remove the checkmarks from Messrs. King and James, among others. (He even offered James a complimentary free checkmark.) And because these checkmarks have now branded anyone who pays for one as a dork with a pathological sense of inferiority, King and James are now explaining to their followers that they are most decidedly not paying to be associated with said dorks.

Meanwhile, that great source of revenue? One researcher says that as of Friday morning, Musk had netted himself all of 28 new Twitter Blue subscribers after the checkmarkopalypse. Which works out to a whopping $2,688 per year in new revenue. Considering Elon shelled out $44 billion for Twitter, an astronomical over-valuation, and considering how much revenue he needs to pay just the yearly interest on the billions he borrowed, he is definitely going to need to get a second job driving for Uber or something to make ends meet.

And that is also before he gets to whatever he might have to pay lawyers to defend him in a defamation suit:

“This is no different than a soft drink maker superimposing @KingJames’ image on their bottle of soda and saying “LeBron Drinks ^{{Our Product}}^” when he doesn’t endorse it.”

— Elie Mystal (@Elie Mystal) 1682036108 

So the genius business owner managed to alienate and drive away the users who actually gave Twitter value as a resource, and replaced them with a handful of fanboys who are now mad that they paid for entry into this club, whereupon all the patrons rolled their eyes at the newcomers’ obnoxiousness and promptly left to get pancakes or go home and have sex with each other. And he might have opened himself up to lawsuits for false advertising.

Somehow on Thursday, Elon saw a $3 billion prototype rocket explode when it had barely cleared the launch pad, saw his paper wealth drop by $12 billion , and these were still only the second- and third-most embarrassing things that happened to him.

[ Twitter / Twitter / The Verge ]

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