Long before multitalented billionaire Elon Musk changed the name of Twitter to X in late 2022, rumors were swirling that he was preparing to overhaul the platform’s authentication system.
His proposal – to charge each subscriber for the privilege of authentication without doing the homework of actually verifying their identity – was a shortsighted and ultimately disastrous decision that Musk reportedly quickly regretted.
In their upcoming book, “Word Limit: How Elon Musk Broke Twitter,” reporters Ryan Mack and Kate Conger detail how Musk’s blue-check-mark system, known as Twitter Blue, collapsed and exacerbated the company’s financial crisis. (The pair recently published an adaptation of their new book in The New York Times.)
The 2022 US midterm elections took place on November 8th, the day before Musk began charging for his blue checkmark.
The switch sparked uproar as countless new verified accounts appeared impersonating politicians, celebrities and companies. One account impersonating Nintendo went viral after sharing an image of Super Mario giving the finger.
Advertisers who noticed the uproar began contacting Twitter’s sales team and threatening to pull their ads, and Nike executives threatened never to advertise on Twitter again, according to Mack and Conger’s sources.
And Musk feared he could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
“Turn the power off,” he reportedly told the engineers. “Turn the power off!”
Twitter Blue, an $8-a-month subscription service, was unlikely to stem all the losses: The company was already heavily in debt; Musk had to borrow about $13 billion to finance a failed $44 billion acquisition.
And business hasn’t improved since Twitter Blue launched just under two years ago, as more advertisers have abandoned the platform as Musk has failed to curb a wave of misinformation and hate speech that Musk himself has actively contributed to.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal called the deal “the worst bank acquisition since the financial crisis” because the bank can’t eliminate its debt without taking huge losses.
Musk has varied his response to advertisers, from literally telling them to “fuck you” to begging them to come back. Earlier this month, he filed a lawsuit to kill a global advertising alliance, alleging that it was conspiring against him.
Twitter has also experienced several mass layoffs, with Musk pleading with employees to return after a few weeks.
So Musk’s ignorant acquisition left a huge stain on his reputation as a successful entrepreneur, revealing his incompetence when it came to running a social media platform.
Meanwhile, X-formerly-Twitter is still rife with impersonators and scammers taking advantage of Musk’s ill-conceived Twitter Blue plan.
And the engineers could only watch helplessly as the billionaire tore down the walls around him.
“It was clearly a train wreck, so the main job of the whole team was to make sure it was as safe a train wreck as possible,” one Blue employee wrote in his journal, as quoted by Mack and Conger.
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