Musk wasn’t done with his bright ideas. He goes ahead with his plan to charge users $7.99 for access to Twitter Blue, a service that included the platform’s blue-checkmark verification. Within days, the site is inundated with users who bought the blue checkmarks so they could impersonate official accounts, including Musk’s own account. One account of note was the person pretending to be the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. They had a real world effect on the company’s stock when they tweeted while pretending to be the company, that their insulin products would now be free. Causing the company’s stock to take a massive hit.
As the impersonators permeate the site, Musk decides to suspend the rollout of the new Twitter Blue program. As the site continues to fall apart, so does the Twitter workforce as some of their engineers begin openly criticizing Musk on social media, with Musk responding by terminating the employment of anyone who dared to do so.
