Elon Musk

Halloween with my Mom pic.twitter.com/xOAgNeeiNN

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022

lmao that he's getting negotiated from $20 to $8 (from a guy who is not gonna pay a cent) and then openly admits Twitter is losing money. shit's gonna crash and burn even harder than I thought

he is just all about the self-own

xps to lagoon it’s just so joyless in a completely gamed way, none of these people are enjoying their money! What’s the point!

yeah its super lame but even lamer are the guys who aspire to be that and spend their time larping it online

it's a bunch of guys who have spent their entire lives heretofore min/maxing their video game characters and obsessing over rare loot drops generated by a random number generator applying that logic to real life now that they're paper millionaires via crypto. all you really need to know is that the inventor of ethereum invented it because he was made that blizzard nerfed his char in WoW.

So far at least two of the very small handful of people I follow on twitter have either deactivated their accounts or announced a break.

Elon's two moms are Moira Rose?

yea I remember this stuff during the online poker boom, a certain subset of young folks got really rich and all they could think to do was buy stupid cars and get mad online. I mean if you play poker for a living there's always something to be angry about. but it did occur to me that these people were just not enjoying their money at all. one of them even used it to make a fictional series about his life that he was gonna shop out to various networks. it was hilarious and not in an intentional way. if these folks just got offline and invested in original pressings of obscure German records they'd be a lot happier.

all you really need to know is that the inventor of ethereum invented it because he was made that blizzard nerfed his char in WoW.

― 龜, Tuesday, November 1, 2022 9:39 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol had not heard that, checks out

omfg… etherium was created as a cope for a world of warcraft nerf?? im losing my fucking mind. imagine being so mad you… what the fuck https://t.co/BX3rrWAtKk pic.twitter.com/4QXuWt6644

— 🌦 (@zemnmez) October 1, 2021

I remember somewhere around peak Google when I read some profile of at least one of the Google dudes and he was driving one of those stupid looking high six figure sports car that looked like Sammy Hagar in vehicle form. I could be worth untold billions and I would literally never buy some yellow spandex jumpsuit with wheels. I can't tell if they're bored, have bad taste, get bad advice ... probably all three. Like, they probably watch "Entourage" for ideas.

yeah theyre just like i should consume the things for rich suckers now

you guys really hate lambos eh

I paid stet a few hundred bucks to get an emoji on my name and he never delivered

ilx rug pull

lol

thinking about this pay-to-verify thing, the intent is to also open it up to normie, currently non-verified users too right? so elon thinks it's not just extorting current blue checks for money, it's a whole new revenue stream. but that obviously dilutes the value of a blue check if anybody can buy it for $8. altho it's already pretty diluted as-is, so many alt-right nutjobs have one via running conspiracy theorist fake news sites.

a pic of some bitcoin millionaire eating the stupidly overpriced gold leaf covered steak at salt bae restaurant

imagine trying to parse this sentence in 2002

Oreos should buy Twitter

How about Blue Check for important people and orange check for nobodys that want to send Twiotter thier social security number

you guys really hate lambos eh

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Tuesday, November 1, 2022 10:04 AM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lambos are sick dont get me wrong, they are 100% for rich suckers tho

i guess if you want to split hairs theyre also for insane rich people, thats really more their image, but most of their sales you have to think come from the suckers

lol just recalled someone telling me about their bitcoin rich cousin who bought a lambo

xxp if it turns into that I can't imagine it'll go any better than the NFT profile picture thing, any rando with a blue check is just gonna get dunked on constantly. unless half the userbase leaves and it turns into 44000000000chan

even if every verified user ponies up the $20/month it's still only enough revenue to cover 10% of Elon's yearly interest cost. absolutely stunning that he's workshopping ideas on how to monetize Twitter AFTER vastly overpaying for it

lambos are a perfect match for crpyto bros because anybody can buy one - perfect nouveaux riche status symbol. ferraris, on the other hand, you have to do insane shit like go to ferrari events, make under the table payments to your local ferrari dealer, get a 'starter' used ferrari to demonstrate you're a true tifosi, all so you can just buy the current model year - perfect old guard / landed gentry elite exclusivity bullshit

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/heres-why-ferrari-wont-sell-you-new-model/

Theory - Musk is actually an idiot who got money out of sheer luck

i think musk is prob good at business, which doesnt mean hes not lucky and privileged, or that he cant make very big mistakes like buying twitter

the farrari lambo dynamic is so funny farrari is in denial lambo openly admits what its all about

xp - I knew the bit about getting them only serviced with Ferrari and the bit about trying to resell one, but had no idea about the rest of it. Def helps me understand why Lambos are the go-to car for the newly rich.

which dates all the way back to their founding when enzo ferrari snubbed the then tractor manufacturer ferruccio lamborghini inspiring him to build his own cars

i mean if you want a ferrari you can always just buy a used one, tho ferrari does try to meddle with that too

I'd already knew about the lamborghini origin story, had no idea this was still going on. Crazy, but I guess it works out pretty well for both Ferrari and Lamborghini?

lolz pic.twitter.com/qwffiIQHgJ

— Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) November 1, 2022

Seriously, though, if status and celebrity is important to Musk, he *should* pay people like Stephen King!

the 'charge for verified' thing would probably work if you restricted it to just brands who are using Twitter to advertise

brands might just fuck off at some point, not because $20 is a lot to them, but because twitter is a bad place for them

He has some idea that doing this will “solve bots and spam” so I think he doesn’t actually care about the price, and he thinks $20 is low.

But if he’s doing this for the revenue then there is no model of charging advertisers or celebrities for use that gets you to 1bn/year.

My wife works in advertising and that is her take on this. It's also brought up in that Verge piece. Twitter's value as an advertising vector is entirely linked to its reputation as a site safe for advertisers.

what does this have to do with bots and spam? I would guess those accounts are not verified, so, uh...I don't get it

the fact that he's trying to negotiate Stephen King down from $20 to $8 is pretty strong evidence that he's not really serious about this and that this is in fact one of those "new boss" moves like Trump's awful Foxconn deal which is intended to show investors and the public that you're willing to make big splashy decisions. I kinda suspect that it wont happen at all.

this guy clearly been reading my posts on the state of social media

Last week I had a lot of conversations about whether social media was dying or not. I don't think it is but it did make me think about shifts away from text and how Twitter is Geriatric Social Media https://t.co/UEvhKVGVJe pic.twitter.com/8jEAxbQx3P

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) November 1, 2022

what does this have to do with bots and spam? I would guess those accounts are not verified, so, uh...I don't get it

yeah this makes little to zero sense, since said botnet owners and spam accounts might be willing to pay $240 per year for the appearance of legitimacy

🤷🏻‍♂️

I will explain the rationale in longer form before this is implemented. It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022

this is already dumber than i anticipated

yeah feel silly for thinking he might play it straight lol

The way to defeat bots & trolls obviously would be to offer free-but-rigorous verification for anyone who wants it. He's doing the opposite, so he's either dumb or disingenuous (or both obviously).

also lmao @ him seeing Stephen King telling him to fuck off and going "uh, would you pay $8?" such a beta move

I wonder if businesses can actually tie data that shows Twitter adverts actually caused sales

I see businesses to be more keen to advertise places like Paramount+ - as more studios rip their stuff out of netflix

have they considered adding different pieces of flair for different types of accounts in addition to the verified badge?

for people with ".eth" in their username they could add a badge for that instead. those people would pay

maybe a badge to indicate interest groups, like verifying someone is a twitch streamer with a number of subscribers over a threshold

a badge to indicate your account has been active over a decade without getting permabanned

NFT owners could put an octagon border around their NFT profile pics. did you know? no? worked out well!

make them pay