Elon Musk, Twitter Conservatives Confused About What Corporations Are

'?????' — Elon Musk

There are an incredible number of stupid things about Elon Musk's plan to charge a subscription fee — first $20 a month, then $8 — for verification badges.

It will undermine the reason for the badges in the first place by making it easier for people to set up fake profiles for celebrities with which to sell cryptocurrency and spew racial slurs, it will make it more difficult for those of us who care about the truth to know if a notable person actually tweeted something, and, ultimately, it will not give his fanbase the legitimacy, social cachet, and power they so desperately want. No one is going to think they are special and important and possibly celebrities for paying $8 a month for what isn't even a very cool-looking emoji.

Oh. And it's also not going to make it so Twitter is not reliant on advertisers. The current advertising revenue is about $5 billion a year. In order to make up for that, 52,083,333 Twitter users would have to sign up for it. That would mean a little less than a quarter of Twitter's 237.8 million users would have to sign up for this — which seems pretty unlikely to happen.

It's already become clear that Twitter under Musk is not as profitable or as attractive to advertisers as Twitter not under Musk — which is awkward given that Twitter was not that profitable then, either. Even with the $5 billion in advertising revenues, the site posted a $220 million loss. And it's gonna get worse. General Motors has paused its advertising on the site. Advertising giant Interpublic Group has advised clients of its IPG Mediabrands agencies to pause advertising on the site.

This will likely continue. The fact is, the user base Musk wants to appease is not a user base that many brands outside of MyPillow are desperate to be associated with. Weirdly, advertisers might not think it's a great idea for ads for their latest product to be sandwiched between racial slurs and potentially dangerous COVID conspiracy theories. Musk just can't rely on advertisers if he wants to give the Right what it so desperately wants.

In what we can assume was something of a hissy fit in response to this news, Musk posted a poll to his Twitter profile on Wednesday asking users whether they thought advertisers should support freedom of speech or political "correctness."

“Advertisers should support: ”

— Elon Musk (@Elon Musk) 1667419781 

Musk's fanbase, of course, rabidly smashed that "freedom of speech" button like there was no tomorrow.

But it is not the job of advertisers to support freedom of speech or political correctness. It is the job of advertisers to make their brands look good and to encourage people to associate their brands with positive, aspirational things. They spend money on advertisements not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they would like to make more money when the people who see those advertisements go out and buy their products. It's not hard .

This, I believe, is the byproduct of decades of rightwing propaganda about the gorgeous benevolence of businesses and corporations and the invisible hand of the free market.

 www.youtube.com 

Their belief in this has had to remain very strong, particularly in light of the way that we as a country have been fucked by corporate greed. They have had to look directly at evidence showing the way worker productiveness has vastly outpaced worker pay and steadfastly maintain that businesses would never pay anyone less than they are worth.

They've believed in small government, in the invisible hand of the free market, in job creators. Job creators who, like the old gods, will continue to bless the population with employment so long as they are given their due reverence and sacrifice.

They have railed against greedy workers who, after the pandemic, greedily refused to go back to making minimum wage and went out looking for better paying jobs instead, or who selfishly formed unions instead of trusting that their employers would always act and pay in their best interest.

They have believed that when corporations destroy the environment or poison drinking water, that they are only doing so because it is what is best for all humanity. They have argued that it is n ecessary to spend absurd amounts of money on healthcare and pharmaceuticals because pharmaceutical companies need that money for innovation purposes (even though they don't actually use it for that and our tax dollars still fund said "innovation") and because, well, insurance companies graciously take our money and redistribute it (mostly among themselves, their stockholders, and the people they pay to tell customers that the medical care they need isn't covered) so that we never have to experience the horrors of socialism.

They have believed that by taxing these corporations less, the wealth would just trickle down. And even when it didn't, they kept the faith that they were still doing the right thing.

They have argued that the only reason we do not live in an absolute paradise that actually provides everything we on the Left say we want — jobs that pay well, affordable health care, a clean and sustainable environment, an end to racial and gender discrimination, etc. — is because we keep regulating corporations instead of letting them fly free, obeying naught but the whims of the invisible hand of the free market.

And now, the invisible hand of the free market keeps slapping them in the face, because it's the profitable thing to do at the moment. If they actually understood capitalism, none of this would surprise them.

None of this is going to work out very well for Musk. The only actual value Twitter has to advertisers or anyone else is its user base. Most people aren't going on Twitter to interact with their friends so much as they go on there to see what celebrities and politicians are saying and what is happening in the world. They're not going on there to have the hot takes of rightwing trolls forced upon them. That would be boring and no one, not advertisers and certainly not 52 million users, is going to pay for that.

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