Stephen King has put some pressure on Elon Musk.
The new king of Twitter over his proposed plan to charge for verification.
Both charging those who are already verified on the service and
also taking verification.
Which is designed to stop people from impersonating others to give those on
the service a bit of assurance that those they're seeing on the service are who
they say they are now.
It's just gonna be a thing you can buy, any troll,
anybody can just buy it if they want to.
Well, Stephen King is not a fan of that.
He tweeted $20 a month to keep my blue check f that they
should pay me if that gets instituted, I'm gone like Enron.
Which I kind of like anyway, we're gonna jump ahead to Elon Musk who did
reply to the horror novelist saying we need to pay the bills somehow,
you've got hundreds of billions of dollars.
I feel you put that cost if you really want to,
goes on to say Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers.
How about $8 and acknowledging that I'm not a businessman,
I do think that this is how business should be conducted.
You should float a trial balloon that it's gonna be $5 and then within one
day say it'll be $20 and then if an author tweets that you should become $8.
I'm not a billionaire.
But I feel like this is how business is supposed to function.
It's just whatever it's up, it's down.
I don't know what do you want it to be and
all the while the people who have stock in this company.
Remember this is a company that people have invested in
are watching this like what the hell is going on with this guy?
But that's also bear in mind the experience of a lot of Tesla investors
over the past years.
So when you have an insane person as your figurehead,
insane things can and will happen Maz, what do you think?
>> John first of all, I think Stephen King wrote it,
you're supposed to say I'm gone like Enron,
[LAUGH] He's the rhyme, you read it, I'm gone.
Like Enron didn't didn't do, they didn't have the effect.
>> I don't know, I'm not a performer.
>> Stephen on the call, he'll clarify but secondly, you wanna charge
me $8 a month so that I could get screamed at by angry Twitter verse really?
That's what you want me to do.
You know how it is, you're on Twitter?
It's such an angst ridden platform because every time I open it,
I'm like, are people liking me today or they're hating me?
So I don't know if I wanna pay $8 a month to just open it up and just get cursed.
I would quickly unsubscribe, I think because what's the point?
It feels like it's gonna be taken over by a lot of just negative,
I mean it already is negative but it's gonna be even worse.
So yeah, I don't know, I mean Elon is clearly a smart person but
also not another one who doesn't seem to be completely sane in many ways.
And so I understand as a businessman,
he's trying to find ways to make this a profitable platform.
Personally, I don't understand like if you've already got ads, how our ads with,
I don't know how many billions of subscribers they have for
hundreds of millions.
You would think they're making money, but somehow they don't, it blows my mind,
Uber didn't make money on the Uber stuff even though they didn't pay their drivers
that much.
They still weren't making money and
it was like Uber eats that started making money for them.
It's always like the thing you don't think it's gonna be used for,
you know what I'm saying?
Maybe if he came up with something we could use Twitter for that,
they never thought would be what you would use Twitter for.
>> I don't know.
I have several thoughts about this,
obviously if you've been watching the show for some time out there in the audience.
I do have thoughts about Elon Musk and the cult of Elon Musk.
Bear in mind he is a billionaire and look, I grew up in America,
I've been trained from birth, like many to assume that whoever has more money than me
is clearly smarter and a harder worker than me.
I get that they're definitely better than us, but maybe he's also an idiot.
Have you considered that?
[LAUGH] I mean look, I get that he took over Tesla, I would really
like it if you were watching this and you think that Elon Musk is a genius.
I would love you to really look into that thought,
do you believe that he's tightening
bolts on the assembly line?
Do you think that he designed the model S,
he's a businessman if you get a nice chair off of Amazon.
Do you think Jeff Baso made it, why do people attribute
all of the good things of these companies to the guy in charge?
They have thousands of engineers who I presume are doing things all day
long whereas Elon Musk is going off to start a flamethrower business or
dig tunnels or something.
Is it possible that maybe he isn't responsible for
all of the good things, but also notably not the bad things.
So like when he says he's gonna buy Twitter and he just launches into it and
he doesn't do any due diligence.
And so he's over paying by at least $10 billion none of his fans are saying,
it turns out he's a dummy, that's all perfectly fine.
But if like they come out with a car that I guess works well then it's
instantly on him.
Like can we ascribe a little bit of critical thought to our
billionaire overlords.
Anyway, I'm gonna demonstrate another version of that right now because he
responded to Stephen King saying, we can't just do the advertisers,
we gotta charge for the verification.
And you might think, okay, well I don't know, it sucks to have to pay for it, but
they do have to pay and maybe this will solve the problem, will it?
Because according to the best estimates,
there are about 400,000 verified accounts at $20 a month,
let alone the eight that brings in like $50 million dollars a year.
Do you know that to service the loans that he took out to buy Twitter,
it's gonna cost Elon Musk $1 billion dollars a year.
This is very much not a solution to the problem,
it's being presented by him as a solution, but either he doesn't know or
doesn't care that it's not actually a solution.
So I don't know like just don't assume that everyone who's rich is a genius.
>> I got an idea, first of all they're not all geniuses,
they're all good at what they do, he's probably he's done some smart stuff.
But as you just said, even if you are a genius, even if you took Albert Einstein,
not all of his ideas are gonna be good ideas,
especially in other fields that aren't mathematics.
So Elon, he's just throwing stuff against the wall hoping something sticks now.
Chris Rock used to have a joke and the joke is about gun control.
He goes, the way you control gun control is not by eliminating
the guns is by raising the prices on bullets.
[LAUGH] He goes, so then if the guy's buying a $5,000 bullet,
he's really gonna reconsider who he shoots.
So rather than charging the blue verified folks, how about you charge
people every time someone wants to make what's an attack you gotta pay $10.
Anytime on Twitter or a dollar, $5 whatever that amount is,
every time you wanna get over there and curse somebody out you gotta pay.
That makes me reconsider.
So if Marjorie Taylor Greene says something really stupid,
I gotta go, is it worth the $5?
And I would probably say yes.
[LAUGH] And then and then the question becomes,
how many thousands of dollars do I spend cursing out Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Which at some point I go, you know what I'm done with her,
I wanna save my money but that's in my opinion, that's a better idea.
Charge people for cursing other people out.
>> Seriously, yeah and if you really hate her, you can take out a loan and
that's how you can continue to reply to her tweets do like that.
This is not the solution to the problem.
Look, he's not an expert on literally everything.
Running Twitter is difficult.
You know how I know that because Twitter couldn't really do it for literally years.
The idea that this guy is gonna jump in and
solve all the problems by just randomly coming up with ideas off the top of
his head based on whatever a popular novelist is most recently set at him.
It's probably not gonna work out well see I don't really care.
Twitter dies that's fine.
But anyway we'll have to see.
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