In Which Elon Pays People To Be His Friend

Elon Musk’s reign running Twitter has been a cavalcade of failure ever since he walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink, but even by the very low standards set so far, last week was quite the sight to behold. Let’s review, shall we?

Let’s start at the beginning. Twitter’s pretty broke. Don’t just take my word for it.

Twitter is ‘skipping rent payments’ broke. Twitter is ‘not giving out promised bonuses‘ levels of broke. Twitter is ‘being sued for $500M of unpaid severance‘ levels of broke. Twitter is a ‘do we really need a Trust and Safety team‘ level of broke. Twitter is ‘who needs parental leave?’ levels of broke. Twitter is ‘do we really need to pay Google or Amazon for cloud servers and other services‘ levels of broke.

Between the headcount loss of engineers to try to get costs down and some of the decisions above, Twitter is technically limping at best. At the beginning of the month, Twitter users were limited to reading only 600 posts a day – not exactly what you want for your advertising based business! Things are back to normal again – or at least, not quite this absurd.

How Twitter got here is quite convoluted. When Elon took over, he announced that he’d try to convert Twitter to be primarily a subscription business (called Twitter Blue), to make it less dependent on ads. To do that, he’d retire the old blue checkmark system given to celebrities (colloquially called the ‘legacy checkmarks’) and sell them to everyone instead.

But nobody wanted to pay for Twitter. As of February, only about 300K accounts signed up for Twitter (Twitter has about 200M Daily Users so call it a 0.15% conversion rate). After legacy checkmarks were retired, only 12000 out of 400K legacy accounts switched to Twitter Blue. It was such a fiasco that Elon ended up giving BACK blue checkmarks to notable celebrities – many of which then urgently stressed to their fans they didn’t pay for it and never would!

Advertising has plummeted because Advertisers are highly skeptical. Big advertisers like Coke, Jeep, and Wells-Fargoo have stopped advertising, and users are now served wall-to-wall ads for Cheech and Chong’s gummies and various wish.com caliber crap.

All of this has been made worse by the fact that Elon burdened Twitter with about $13B worth of debt that has to be paid off. Twitter was a tight margin business previously that flirted with profitability before acquisition. The destruction of the advertising base combined with these huge interest payments dramatically changed this calculations to be a massive whiff. Twitter is – as Elon said in the first tweet above – not cash flow positive, and not even close.

Which made it all the more surprising when last week a bunch of blue checkmarked Tweeters reported getting informed they were getting big payouts from Twitter, in the $20K range.

When pressed upon it, Elon stressed that the payouts were based on ads that were served in replies to their threads to other verified members, stressing that content to free users was easy to manipulate. And let me just say, it sure is funny that the CEO of a business based on serving ads to an audience that is 99.8% non-subscribers is saying that any metrics including those numbers are untrustworthy and shouldn’t be counted! Wonder how the advertisers feel about this!

This is also funny because a core promise of Twitter Blue – and indeed the primary benefit for most users – is that you won’t see very many ads! So Twitter Blue went from the feature that would make ads unnecessary to the service and where subscribers wouldn’t see very many to one where Blue users MUST be shown ads in order to succeed!

Also, if you think this sounds like a pyramid scheme or an MLM… yeah, kinda does! It’s a transparent attempt to goose blue subscriptions with the promise that you, too, could be getting $25K checks instead of being one of the greater fools shelling out $8/month.

But wait, it gets better. Over on Bluesky, Parker Molloy noted that one particular power user was kind of pissed off.

CatTurd2 is a MAGA diehard with 1.8M followers, who was banned by the old Twitter regime before being reinstated when Elon took over. Despite being an unqualified garbage person, the esteemed Mr. Turd2 is an endless source of amusement to me, given that he constantly complains about being treated unfairly by Elon’s twitter DESPITE BEING ARTIFICIALLY ALGORITHMICALLY BOOSTED. So it would be easy to say this was just Catturd being … turdlike. But no, another person in Catturd’s circle of MAGA doofuses did a little research and discovered that, no, it wasn’t a systematic thing, just checks sent out to a handful of handpicked posters — mysteriously, posters that interact with Elon a lot.

Hey, remember when the whole point of selling blue checkmarks was because the old way was rife with cronyism? I love irony! Anyway, Taylor Lorenz for the Washington Post confirmed this, essentially, saying that contributors collecting money would need to undergo human review. The same article interviews various former Twitter employees who want to stress that it all sounds like a BS marketing stunt.

So out of the people Elon handpicked to get cash payouts, who got paid? Well, for starters, the world’s most notorious sex trafficker.

Media Matters did a bigger roundup of those who announced they were receiving payouts, which includes 9 accounts that got paid out – all of which are right-wing and/or anti-woke commentators. Two others (the Krassenstein brothers) are token left-leaners, but also are suspected fraudsters who were banned from Twitter for literally the sort of platform manipulation Elon claims is bringing down the service (Elon brought them back when he took over).

While we don’t know about anyone who HASN’T tweeted their earnings, it’s still pretty notable that 80% of the people we know Elon picked echoes his antiwoke (read: racist, sexist homophobic and transphobic) worldview. If you want to make money from Twitter, be a right-wing and/or anti-woke influencer who regularly takes a shit on marginalized minorities. All of this is especially interesting given that the audience that Elon bought leans left by a 2 to 1 margin.

That’s right. Elon is literally paying conservatives to torment, start fights with and drive off his core audience.

As an aside, one of the reasons Advertisers were fleeing Twitter was because their ads were, in Elon’s new regime, appearing directly above or below some terrible shit. Advertisers should be aware that this is no longer about their ads appearing next to white nationalist posts, but rather that their ad money will go directly into the pockets of – almost exclusively – sex traffickers, racists, transphobes, vaccine denialists and January 6th defenders. If you advertise on Twitter, you fund hate. Directly.

So what’s next? Well, that’s easy. Elon has promised to massively increase these payouts. But as you consider these promises in mind, remember…. Twitter doesn’t have any money, and has no interesting new revenue pipelines coming.

All of this feels very much like a publicity stunt to try to keep their key influencers from leaving and to convince anyone that Twitter Blue is still a good idea. But why would they feel the need to do that? Gee, that’s a real puzzle.

As a parting gift, please enjoy CatTurd remaining super mad.

Concerning.