Elon Musk introduced the “Twitter Blue” blue checkmark system soon after taking over the social media company in 2022. Musk dreamed of raking in the big bucks with it, but according to a new book, he quickly regretted introducing it.
The plan is to give a blue checkmark to anyone willing to pay the fee — ideally these users would be called “verified users,” even though their identities haven’t actually been verified.
The upcoming book “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter” details how this plan went awry and, far from filling the company’s bank account, deepened the company’s financial crisis. In the book, reporters Ryan Mack and Kate Conger say the blue tick became troubling because its introduction coincided with the US midterm elections.
The 2022 midterm elections were held on November 8th, and the next day Musk announced Twitter Blue and began charging users. However, problems began when several accounts that appeared verified started posing as celebrities, politicians, and companies. An account pretending to be Nintendo on the X even shared an image of Super Mario giving the middle finger. The image went viral.
Twitter’s sales team was inundated with calls from advertisers unhappy with fake profiles appearing as verified, who threatened to pull their ads, including multi-billion-dollar companies like Nike, which wanted to leave the platform for good, according to Mack and Conger’s report.
Musk was reportedly horrified by the threats and told the engineers to “turn it off, turn it off!”
Musk buys Twitter
The SpaceX CEO had big dreams for Twitter (now known as X) when he took over the company, but the sale meant the company needed to borrow about $13 billion to pay for the $44 billion acquisition, meaning it was already in financial disarray.
Many advertisers have reportedly left X due to misinformation and hate speech on the platform.
The Wall Street Journal recently called the deal “the worst bank acquisition since the financial crisis.” Musk has been vocal about his frustrations with advertisers who have abandoned him, even filing an antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers, an ad trade group.
Musk also carried out mass layoffs to cut costs and was unable to even pay rent on some of its offices around the world.