Elon Musk Will Solve Twitter By Selling YOU, YES, YOU A Rocket Ship

Blaze it!

Everyone knows that "Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it." And yet, Elon Musk just shelled out $44 billion for the privilege of being dogpiled online every day from here to eternity. So much for the myth of the boy genius leading us all into the 21st century tech utopia.

Since marching into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink — get it? get it? comedy is legal now, bro! — Musk has engaged in a bizarre public ritual of punching himself in the dick every day, sometimes more than once, to the mixed delight and horror of onlookers. As someone who has more or less lived on Twitter for the past six years, I must admit it's rather like roasting marshmallows as the flames slowly engulf your house. The only consolation is that it is clearly going to be way worse for that fucking idiot than for me.

The mass layoffs are a horror show, with employees and supervisors being given no notice other than suddenly disappearing from Slack and having their email cut off. The place is leaking like a sieve, with news immediately emerging that Musk and his posse have floated a plan to put the entire site behind a paywall.

The Verge got a transcript of an all-staff meeting, called on 30 minutes notice, and it is BATSHIT. Apparently he thinks the site can be transferred into PayPal by next Friday:

I think there’s this transformative opportunity in payments. And payments really are just the exchange of information. From an information standpoint, not a huge difference between, say, just sending a direct message and sending a payment. They are basically the same thing. In principle, you can use a direct messaging stack for payments. And so that’s definitely a direction we’re going to go in, enabling people on Twitter to be able to send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real time. We just want to make it as useful as possible.

And also, simultaneously, YouTube, which is like school:

Look, my kids were basically educated by Reddit and YouTube, which, like, uh-oh. I think let’s just try it. Let’s just get a bunch of content creators that we think are cool on YouTube and say, “Hey, would you consider putting your content on Twitter, and we’ll pay you 10 percent more than YouTube and see how it goes?” Let’s do that. Okay, great. So you will do that?

[Inaudible exchange.]

Okay, collectively, you’ll do it. Great. Please do it. Let’s take action. I’m a big believer in having just a maniacal sense of urgency. So if you can do it after this meeting, I would do it after this meeting. Just a maniacal sense of urgency. Like, if you want to get stuff done, maniacal sense of urgency. Just go “aah!” Hardcore!

Hardcore!

The debacle of selling blue checkmarks and verifying anyone with $8 reached peak hilarity when a verified fake Tesla account tweeted, "We will be offering 10 thousand vehicles to support the Ukrainian military. Our cars are the most advanced explosive devices on the market,” and "BREAKING: A second Tesla has hit the World Trade Center." See, comedy is legal now! Or was until Musk banned it, huffing, “Going forward, accounts engaged in parody must include 'parody' in their name, not just in bio.” Womp womp .

The blue check fire sale had to be halted entirely after a verified account purporting to be Eli Lilly tweeted, "We are excited to announce insulin is free now,” sending the drugmaker's stock tumbling and prompting the company to vow never to advertise on the platform again. And Eli Lilly's not alone — the media analysis site Ad Age is keeping a running tally of Twitter's hemorrhaging advertiser base, and it's pretty clear they're gonna run out of major advertisers before we run out of marshmallows.

Which brings us to the funniest post of all today -- so far, anyway -- with Elon Musk's SpaceX rushing in with cash to fill the void left by people advertising shit you might actually want to buy. Watch Guru reports that Elon Musk's rocket ship company has purchased a giant ad package in Spain and Australia to promote its satellite packages.

The aerospace company intended to purchase a package known as Twitter “takeover.” It is estimated to cost more than $250,000. Starlink would receive constant daylong promotions through this package at the top of Twitter’s timeline. The first three times Twitter users in Australia and Spain open the app, Starlink’s brand messaging is anticipated to appear.

So if you're in Ibiza or Canberra and looking to buy a spaceship, Elon's got you covered.

It's like when Tucker Carlson got so racist that no major company wanted to run ads on his show, and it was just weird ads to BUY GOLD interspersed with MyPillow spots. But unlike a rocket ship, Fox viewers can actually sleep on a crappy foam pillow.

“Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.”

— Elon Musk (@Elon Musk) 1668012287 

Ah well, never mind. Looks like it's all under control then.

OPEN THREAD.

[ Verge / Watch Guru ]

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