As He Realized His Mistake, Elon Musk Begged Twitter Staff to Turn Off the New Feature He’d Pushed For

[Pelican Press 0]

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As He Realized His Mistake, Elon Musk Begged

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Staff to Turn Off the New Feature He’d Pushed For

In late 2022, long before multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk

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, rumors swirled that he was getting ready to shake up the platform’s verification system.

His proposal:

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without ever doing the homework of actually verifying their identity — a short-sighted and ultimately disastrous decision that Musk reportedly regretted almost immediately.

As detailed in an upcoming book titled “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed

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,” reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger lay out in detail how Musk’s blue checkmark scheme, called

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Blue,

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 and compounded the company’s financial crisis. (The pair recently

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adapted from their new book in the New York Times.)

The 2022 US midterm elections took place on November 8, a day before Musk started charging users for a blue checkmark.

When the switch was made,

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, with countless newly verified accounts masquerading as politicians, celebrities, and companies. One account parading as Nintendo shared a

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.

Advertisers, who had gotten wind of the mayhem, started reaching out to

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’s sales teams, threatening to pull their ads. According to Mac and Conger’s sources, Nike executives threatened to never advertise on the platform again.

And Musk was terrified of the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.

“Turn it off,” he reportedly told an engineer. “Turn it off!”

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Blue, a $8-a-month subscription service, was unlikely to stem all the bleeding. The company was already dealing with considerable debt. Musk

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for his doomed $44 billion acquisition.

And business hasn’t exactly looked up since

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Blue launched just under two years ago. Even more advertisers have abandoned the platform over Musk’s ******** to reign in a

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— something he’s been

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.

Just last week, the

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 the “worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis,” with banks unable to offload their debt without incurring major losses.

Musk has bounced back and forth between telling advertisers to literally “

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 and begging them to return. Earlier this month, Musk

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, accusing it of conspiring against him.

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has also gone

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, with Musk

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.

Story continues

In short, Musk’s ill-informed takeover has left a major ***** in his reputation as a successful entrepreneur. His incompetency when it comes to running a social media platform has been on full display.

Meanwhile, X-formerly-

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is still rife with impersonators and scammers taking advantage of Musk’s poorly thought-out

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Blue scheme.

And engineers could only helplessly watch as the billionaire brought down the walls around them.

“It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible,” one Blue worker wrote in a journal, as quoted by Mac and Conger.

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#Realized #Mistake #Elon #Musk #Begged #

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#Staff #Turn #Feature #Hed #Pushed

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