For most people signing into Twitter these days,
the best thing that you could hope for, I guess, is a little bit of anger,
worst case scenarios, depression, a complete loss of faith in humanity.
But that's not true for everyone.
Some people logging into Twitter this week are finding a nice little boost.
Specifically, right-wing posters that Elon Musk is obsessed with are finding checks.
They're being given by the richest man in the world, thousands of dollars for
posting on website that he owns.
The first beneficiaries of what is being pitched as a new ad revenue sharing plan
are high-profile far right influencers who they've been tweeting what they've earned.
Ian Miles Cheong, Benny Johnson, Ashley St.
Clair, all talking about their earnings.
An account called EndWokeness said that they made $10,419 for,
I don't know, a day of content, a week of content, a month of content.
Nobody actually knows how this works because it is as arbitrary as it seems.
And it, by the way, has nothing to do with threads coming out.
It has nothing to do with people leaving the service,
nothing to do with him being worried that the people that he is a reply guy to on
a daily basis might ever abandon him.
Now, it's not just the accounts that we've mentioned.
Andrew Tate apparently has made $20,000, a nice boost for
him as he faces the human trafficking and rape charges that he's currently facing.
An account called DC_Drano made $7,000, after he acknowledges previously being
banned prior to Elon Musk taking over for spreading election denial lies.
Now, not in response to this guy, but in response to a different one,
another person I've never heard of before.
Elon Musk says you're welcome.
This is not in response to competitors.
I announced we would do this in February.
Sorry it took so long to roll out.
It is only right that content creators are rewarded for their contributions.
Now, that is not 100% wrong.
He has, for a few months,
been saying that they're going to do some sort of revenue thing,
where if they do ads on your posts or in the replies, you can make some money.
So there is an element of truth there.
The idea that this has nothing to do with the fact that over
100 million people sign up for threads in the first week, though, is utterly absurd.
There has thus far been no indication of any sign up process for this.
I haven't seen anyone who is not a far right grifter who has earned thousands of
dollars this.
It appears to be, and
until I see evidence, I'm going to assume that it is what it seems to be.
He has chosen the accounts that he likes and he has decided,
I'm just gonna throw thousands of dollars at them as a treat.
And they'll probably love him even more.
I mean, wouldn't you?
>> Yeah, so, first of all, John's right are almost all right-wingers,
so I am objectively helping creators.
First of all, if you did it based on impact,
you probably wouldn't get any political people.
You might get sports people, et cetera.
No, it's super obvious, you're picking all the guys who were, like, retweeted you.
It's hilarious, okay?
I think I saw one set, like the Krassenstein Brothers or something.
>> Who are massive Elon Musk supporters now.
If you don't know that, they still technically like the Democrats or
whatever, but they love Elon Musk.
>> Yeah, guys, he's literally paying people to like him, literally.
>> He's buying friends.
>> Okay, so now to give you a sense of how unsustainable this is and
what a terrible business idea it is, there's two things I have to tell you.
Number one, I know the numbers, right?
I run a digital media company, so I know exactly how this type of stuff works.
Paying 10,020 thousand for a bunch of tweets,
[LAUGH] that's totally unsustainable.
Like, if he did that as a real business practice and
he paid everybody on Twitter, proportionally, what he paid those guys.
The $44 billion would be nothing compared to what he'd have to pay
the creators, right?
There's no way in the world you could afford that.
It would sink the company immediately, overnight, right?
So these payments are totally out of proportion to the value
that those guys created, which then just kind of, again,
comes back to he's paying people to like him.
It's one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen.
And if you're a business person, you don't know that a bunch of tweets, no matter
how many impressions they got, are almost never going to be worth $10,000.
Let alone per month, let alone 20,000 to the rapist, dude.
Sorry, alleged rapist, okay?
So now the last part of it is now that you've done this, and again,
I run a business, so I've seen this happen.
And you gave it to some people, but not others.
No, here's what's gonna happen next, and it's already begun to happen.
I saw it today.
First thing is all the people on the left go, wait, where's our money?
What the hell?
You're so bad.
The people in the mainstream media, they don't say it, but they're like,
because they see that their tweets get more impressions than the Rando Romanian
rapist, right?
And the Draino dude, or whatever.
And they're like, but mainstream media won't say that.
They'll just write super crappy articles about you, okay?
So that's coming down the pike.
But those two factors are not the most damaging.
The most damaging is other right-wingers who didn't get paid.
And now and I've seen it at the beginning of it, they're gonna rip his face off.
You'll be like, where's my money?
Why did Drano get it?
But I'm clorox and I didn't get it.
I hate trans people even more than they do.
Where's my money?
And then he's gonna be like, he's gonna panic,
and he's gonna give a little bit there and a little bit there.
And then the next thing that's gonna happen is people are gonna say,
wait a minute, that guy got more than me.
I want just as much as him.
Until everyone wants $20,000 a month, and then they're gonna withdraw the program.
Then the guys he gave the money to,
they're gonna be mad that they're not getting the money anymore.
So good news for people who don't like Elon Musk or
Twitter pandemonium is about to break out there.
>> I was actually gonna say that exact same thing.
He now has set the precedent where the first little weirdos that he's paid,
he's gonna have to keep paying them that or they will turn against him and
start whining and complaining.
And that was brilliant about all everybody else getting mad, too.
But I've been saying for years, and I've been saying it on Twitter,
which I'm barely doing anything on Twitter anymore just because it's not fun anymore.
But this is a big reason why people need to stop
signal-boosting some of these weirdos all over Twitter.
There are so many people who I know who they are, and
I shouldn't know who they are, but I only know who they are because people on
the left want to start fights with them or they want to rebut them.
Let it go, you're not changing people's minds.
You might get in a fun zinger every now and then, but stop it.
Especially now, because now you're giving these people maybe thousands of dollars.
So don't do it anymore.
If you withdraw, if you bite your tongue every now and then, and
by God, I do it every time I log into that app.
Let them go.
Just let them bark in the dark, and then it won't be an issue anymore.
So many people need to learn that lesson.
But the second thing is that there's no accountability with any of this,
with YouTube, with Facebook,
all of these other websites where you post to and you get paid for it.
There's algorithms you can log into your back end.
You see your RPM, your CPM, your impression rate, your clickthrough rate,
you know who is doing what to your stuff, and it's all accountable.
You can add it all up, and it's right there.
With this, this is Elon Musk just saying, you know what, Andrew Tate again,
who I wouldn't know if people on the left hadn't retweeted him.
20 grand. Here you go, 20 grand.
He's making it up as he goes.
And like Cenk said, it's not sustainable.
You are setting yourself up for the ultimate failure, and
it's going to be the funniest thing in the world when this blows up in your face.
And I don't think more than a month down the road before we see that massive
explosion of this blowing up in his face.
>> Maybe, by the way, if you thought that there would be something that Elon Musk
could do to make this even more ridiculous, bear in mind, of course,
he is an innovator.
He's a genius.
He will come up with a way. So this is only for verified people,
obviously.
Verified, they're not verified, but they do pay dollars to Elon Musk.
This is basically like multilevel marketing right now.
In particular, only verified people contribute to this.
He also, by the way, it's ads in your replies that verified people are seeing.
But one of the big advertised benefits of being verified is that you see less ads.
So that's a weird combination right there.
By the way, I don't know if you've looked at his replies today in the last couple of
days, he is non stop tweeting about threads.
So again, the idea that this is not about threads, he cannot stop tweeting about it.
He replied to someone who was like, well, if leftists or
Democrats want the money, they just need to make accounts and do verified.
So first of all, are we supposed to pretend that this
is just like the invisible hand of the market?
You changed the algorithm to boost right-wing accounts, and now you're paying
them for being right-wing accounts that you boosted already.
Utterly absurd, and I will also point out.
We have made the case to people for quite a while that right-wingers exist, and
many people become right-wingers to get paid by millionaires and billionaires.
And that was always at least mildly abstract.
We're done with that now.
It is literally just the richest right-winger in the country, in the world,
writing checks to right-wing grifters to sustain them.
And it's definitely gonna make some people want to do that so
that they can get the checks.
It's now totally out in the open, they're bragging about it.
The entire infrastructure, the entire right-wing economy that they've created.
>> Yeah, so what's funny is that all these right-wing sites popped up.
Parlor grifter, whatever they are, right?
True Social, obviously rumble and rumble, and none of them worked because it was
just conservatives, like, ragging on people, but there was nobody else.
Now, ironically, Musk is turning Twitter into True Social or
getter, the ones that didn't work.
He spent $44 billion to turn it into a way crappier site or
app that we know definitively is a bad business model.
The more he keeps going,
the more it becomes stunning what a terrible businessman he is.
I've never seen anything like it.
Look Farron, you're brilliant.
And even just in this 1 hour and all the topics that we've discussed,
you have a lot of great ideas, and you're totally right that he's making it up.
I thought it was hilarious that he's like,
we have a proprietary algorithm that has told us how much we should pay them.
[LAUGH] No, you don't.
I know those numbers.
Those numbers are not from a proprietary algorithm.
You just picked them out of a hat.
But having said all that, Farron,
you've never been more wrong than your suggestion of just let it go.
Like people on Twitter are gonna let it go.
Okay, [LAUGH] nobody's gonna let it go on Twitter, okay?
By the way, I'm not even gonna let it go on Twitter.
But Farron, these days, all there is are the clout wars, and everybody wants clout.
And the way you get clout is you attack someone that has more followers
than you have.
That's the thing I just discovered.
>> No, I disagree.
I always try to avoid that drama, and it has worked for
me with very minimal growth over a very long period of time.
>> [LAUGH]. >> By the way, follow me on Threads.
>> [LAUGH] And by the way, John, I don't have a Threads account yet.
I don't think.
So, John, as soon as I get on there, since you will have more followers than me,
I'm gonna attack you.
>> I can't wait.
And I'm gonna ignore it based on what Farron said.
>> See, there you go.
And then I'm gonna keep on attacking you until I have more followers.
Welcome to the clout wars.