Stephen King refused to pay Twitter $ 20 for a verification checkmark

The American writer Stephen King was outraged by a Twitter innovation — the bestselling author refused to pay $ 20 a month to keep the Twitter Blue verification checkbox.

$ 20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) October 31, 2022

Elon Musk immediately reacted to the writer’s words, starting to «bargain» with King — Musk offered to reduce the price to $ 8 per month. Some time later that day, Elon published an official statement that maintaining Twitter Blue status would still cost $ 8 per month for all verified accounts. Obviously, public outrage and complaints from celebrities influenced the decision of Twitter’s sole director.

According to Musk, without a fee for verifying profiles, it will be difficult for the company to generate revenue and pay bills, because Twitter will not be able to «live off advertisers» forever. The billionaire promised to explain his «math» in more detail later.

In addition to innovations on Twitter, Musk planned to relaunch his competitor TikTok by the end of this year. As it became known yesterday, the billionaire has instructed Twitter programmers to work on the restoration of Vine, a video-sharing platform. Twitter acquired the service back in 2012, and for a certain period of time, Vine was the No. 1 app in the iTunes App Store. It had 200 million active users, but over time, the high performance declined. SpaceX and Tesla’s ownership is confident that the video sharing service will eventually become more popular than TikTok.