Elon just went through several bad ideas to come back to the original checkmark system from 2015. The left think they just played him.
A radio station was replacing their popular DJs but knew there would be backlash. So, the new DJs pretended to be hosts for new trial DJs that were awful. Soon people were demanding the new DJs stay in charge.
I get the feeling that just happened. Did Elon do that, or was it happenstance?
I have a feeling some of it is he played them, thanks to the blue checkmarks system this week, a big pharma company just had 5% or 20 billion dollars wiped off their share price so companies were probably begging Elon to go back to the 2015 system.
If I am a vindictive, slightly machiavellian man (which I am) Elon knew this would happen, let it happen as a message to say 'you can take your ads but I can hurt you WAY more than you think you can hurt me'
That's a good way to view it.
If your share prices are that volatile that a fake message can tank the stocks I don't want to know how fragile your business is.
Hard to say for sure though it's quite the common practice to deceive your customers into demanding what you want to give them.
The hard part is knowing what the intentions of the business/management/leader (in this case Elon) were going in.
There is a.... saying? wisdom? ... that customers don't really know what they specifically want, they will routinely ask for things that would make their experience with a product worse. However a customer will usually feel something is wrong.
This is where these kinds of plays come in, you direct that wrong feeling into the answer you want to get because the customer doesn't actually know how to fix the problem you can direct their feeling to do a 360 essentially buying yourself time. Will they complain again ? sure but it might take years.
Sometimes this happens as a cycle (rising minimum wage for example), sometimes an outright lie (new management), the often used fake sales (50% off but still the same price), or the one you just said where make things worse so people want their normal back.
All these are ways to manipulate your customer
This was $44 Billion worth of Fuck You money. Rise, drop, sink or float, this was never about making a successful business so much as fucking over everyone he could that had pissed him off with as little effort as possible. This has been the single greatest event of their lifetimes and they're too fucking pigeon brained to see it.
Elon isn't going to stop selling checkmarks for $8.
He may have paused the rollout thanks to the libtards having themselves an orgy over some early abuse, but that doesn't mean he's given up on the idea entirely.
It probably wasn't 4D chess, but it has made communists very agitated, so I fully support it.
Please elaborate.
There is a conspiracy going around that Elon owning Twitter is basically just a meme that went to far and now he is in over his head and trying to find a way out.
I dont buy it. It doesnt matter if you are the richest man in the world. You dont blow tens of billions of dollars on a meme. I think Elon had a plan, got a lot more pushback than he was expecting, and is now trying to adapt the plan to make sure he can actually pull off his whole "Turn Twitter into a free-speech platform" and be in a secure position before he draws the Eye of Sauron upon him.
If we are being more honest, I think him talking to groups like the ADL at the same time they were killing his advertising, and then using them killing his advertising as an excuse to yeet the ADL and say "I am not working with them" while looking reasonable to the average Normie.
I don't buy it either.
The Internet is a stupid place.
There was a lot of Democrat coping along this same line when Trump won in 2016, too. All sorts of "experts" came out of the woodwork to lecture the peasants on how his manner of speaking, dress, facial expressions, hirings and firings, etc. all meant he stumbled into the office and was now scared and flailing. This strikes me as more of the same, and from almost entirely the exact same people.
I'd say not. He's actually got good ideas that would make it competitive against YouTube, Twitch and Tik Tok