On October 27th, 2022, Elon Musk made the 44-billion-dollar decision to purchase Twitter and become the owner of the platform. This choice made by Elon, which some viewed as a terrible investment and waste of money had a multiple month saga of actions that lead to the purchase of the toxic platform. On April 4th Elon Musk went onto Twitter and proceeded to release and leak that he is Twitter’s largest shareholder holding a 9% stake within the company. Seeing this information was now publicly announced, the following day CEO Parag Agrawal within a letter that agreed to appoint Elon Musk to its board of directors, to which Elon declined. April 13th, 2022, Elon Musk made a legal offer to purchase Twitter at $54.20 per share, as his “Best and final offer.” It is known that staff were very uneasy about this possibility and saw it as possibly hostile and not good for the company’s future takeover. As soon as the company belonged to Musk the changes began. He fired CEO Parag Agrawal, Twitters top lawyer, financial officer, and head of public policy.  

A new policy also implemented by the new owner was a $7.99 monthly subscription in order to receive one of the most sought-after twitter features; the blue check. The blue check that is very well-known was previously used for knowing that an account for a creator, musician, artist etc. Was verified and truly them so no scamming could happen in their name. Now, anybody can buy it! With the subscription you won’t even be able to get no ads, you only get HALF ads! It is also mentioned that with a blue check you get priorities in searches, chats, tweets, mentions and comments and if you don’t purchase it, you will simply be pushed to the bottom by the people willing to pay. It was announced that in order to hopefully solve hate speech and negativity on the platform, any unverified users (who are unwilling or unable to pay $7.99 a month) would be really hard to find or as Elon Musk said himself “You’ll have to scroll really far to see unverified users.”  

This new “Twitter Blue” is virtually shadow banning the majority of the public’s opinions. Twitter was once used as a platform to voice opinions and go to petition for change for FREE, now in order to be seen or have a voice you must pay money. “You’ll need to cough up $8 a month to have a voice. This is the exact opposite of free speech which he claims to champion for the platform.” Well-Known YouTuber Charles White says in a video titled “Twitter is Dying.” Many, many influencers have spoken up about how not seemingly right this new system seems to be. Elon was losing money at a fast rate on Twitter, so this blue check was his grand plan. A large portion of advertisers also pulled out of Twitter which lost Elon even MORE money.  Even after a month though of people buying this horrendous idea, it would only make 4 million dollars which doesn’t even cover TWO DAYS of Twitter’s operating costs. Elon has already revealed to the public that Twitter is losing 4 million dollars a day anyways and he “had no choice” but to cut thousands of people from their jobs at Twitter.   

Scam companies or users used to have to pay up to 15,000 thousand dollars for a well-known and or well followed account with verification to scam and make money through Twitter. Now, scammers can pay $7.99 a month for a verified account and scam much easier. Not only that, but people can also now impersonate well-known companies or corporations with ease. Examples of this happening within the FIRST MONTH of the new check system are unbelievable. Many companies have already lost BILLIONS of dollars! The first example is somebody impersonating the Eli Lilly and Company with the blue check and tweeting out “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” This single tweet TANKED the stock of Eli Lilly and Company down by 3% instantly. From one single troll tweet, massive impacts were made upon the stock. The next example is somebody acting as LockHeed Martin with the check and tweeting “We will begin halting all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States until further investigation into their record of human rights abuses. #WeAreLM” to which almost instantaneously the stock dropped 5.3%.  

As of November 11th, Elon Musk has paused the Blue Check subscription and more updates will be posted as more information is released to media.