On October 27, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s HQ carrying a sink. He tweeted a video of this with the caption “let that sink in,” then changed his bio to “chief twit.” This was his way of telling everyone that he finally bought Twitter after almost 6 months of saying he would. The first thing Musk did as CEO was fire the former CEO, CFO, head of legal policy, trust, safety, and general counsel. 

Three days later, it was reported that Twitter would let anyone get a verification badge next to their username. All they had to do was sign up for Twitter Blue, which was going to rise from $4.99/month to $20/month. Before this, Twitter Blue was only used for editing tweets and getting early access to features. In response to the backlash, Musk lowered the price to $8. 

On November 4, Twitter began to mass fire employees. Anybody who wrote less than X% of code in the past year was laid off. The lines of code these people wrote were the hardest to write, and they helped with quality control and privacy. Shannon Liss-Riordan sued Twitter for not giving their employees enough notice and demanded that all fired employees would get severance pay for two months.

On the same day, Twitter’s biggest advertisers left the platform and stopped paying Musk. He responded, saying that these advertisers were pressured to leave by “activist groups.”

Many verification incidents happened on Twitter in the past few days. A Nintendo impersonator tweeted an image of Mario flipping off the viewer. An Eli Lilly and Company impersonator said that insulin was going to be free, causing their stocks to completely tank. The real Eli Lilly had to apologize for this dream come true. Hundreds of celebrity parody accounts are tweeting the most bizarre sentences known to man, and many casual viewers believe these are coming straight from the celebrities themselves. This is all thanks to the 8$ verification check mark.

So Elon took it away. New Twitter Blue subscribers can no longer receive the verification check mark. Pre-existing subscribers still have this check mark, however.

People have started to move to Tumblr instead. In response to this, pre-existing Tumblr users began posting some of the most cringey and inane things to keep the toxic Twitter fanbase away. Even the official Tumblr Twitter account is joining in on this. Will it work? Who knows?