Elon Musk

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

I knew that, even if only because these people get ruthlessly mocked the instant they step outside their cryptobubbles

ten years later, haggling with Steven King about paying money to post on the bird sitehttps://t.co/7H37to05mc

— /📷 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐱 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐰 📷/ (@HongPong) November 1, 2022

otoh he did put hairs on a man

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

given how much money gets spent on Twitter ads I'm sure they have this data but yeah I'd be curious how much that's changed over the last few years. and how much it's going to change now that a right-wing birdbrain has decided to make himself the very public face of the platform.

Lol we're fucked https://t.co/obO3GvojLy pic.twitter.com/pvyYhutBiT

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) November 1, 2022

starting to understand why ol' Musky was so desperate to get out of this deal

The banks that lent Elon money to take over Twitter are admitting that they're in for a "huge" haircut https://t.co/CesZzGUGVF pic.twitter.com/c9aVxUOzLf

— Henry Farrell (@henryfarrell) November 1, 2022

Shit like this bolsters my belief that Elon will be fine, even as Twitter goes down in flames.

wonder how much he ends up selling twitter to some private equity fund for, $5b maybe, less or maybe much less, 0 + liabilities perhaps

looking forward to hearing the news in a few years that twitter is now owned by macedonian online gambling company or w/e

" I owe the bank $100,000, that's my problem. If I owe the bank $1,000,000,000, that's their problem."

eventual musk take: inadvertently destroying the rats nest that is twitter to clear the way for whatever comes next was my greatest accomplishment

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

I like thinking about this stuff because I know some car guys but I only know one with a lambo. he has bonkers amounts of money and never feels validated by the world and the car is so clearly "well, fuck you, I get THIS," but at the same time, fuck those are sick ass cars

I mean, he's making X the Everything App, think about how much everything generates in sales per year