Elon Musk (file image)On November 9, 2022, there was a lot of nervousness among Twitter employees gathered at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. They had spent part of the morning gently explaining to their new boss, Elon Musk, that the newly launched service was dangerous.
Twitter Blue, a subscription service that now lets users buy one of the platform’s coveted verification badges, had only been online for a few hours when Musk – who had bought the company two weeks earlier and later renamed it X – left the glass-walled conference room overlooking San Francisco City Hall to speak with an assistant. Employees knew that users relied on the verification checkmarks to ensure that the information on the platform – including bus schedules, hurricane evacuation orders or the thoughts of a pop star – was actually real.
When Musk re-entered the room, the chatter died down. No one expected him to be with them so long on launch day, but he picked through the snacks – at one point eating half a doughnut in a single bite. He encouraged employees who expressed concerns to be “adventurous.”
“We’re going to shoot from the hip in real time,” Musk said, cupping his hands into finger guns. Previously, Blue was a small part of the company’s business, which made 90 percent of its revenue from advertising. Blue allowed a few thousand diehard users to pay for premium features, such as the ability to edit their tweets and customize the Twitter app on their phones, but it never really took off. For Musk, a Twitter fanatic who bought the company for $44 billion, the service represented an untapped financial opportunity.
Musk’s attempt to save a company he saw as a sinking ship was based on the idea that he could convince people – millions of them – to pay for Twitter Blue. But that plan was doomed from the start, as the Twitter owner’s nearly two-year tenure ruined the company’s finances and tarnished his reputation as a generational entrepreneur.
During his time at the helm, Musk went through periods of high confidence and self-doubt, making abrupt decisions that he then reversed. The tumult of his takeover was evident in his handling of Blue, which he shut down the day after its unveiling amid a barrage of criticism but reopened a month later. Since then, the site’s checkboxes have become a hodgepodge of paid, free and fake identifiers that amount to little more than confusion.
Musk’s plan for Blue was to sell Twitter’s verification checkmarks as part of the subscription.
On November 10, major advertisers began calling Twitter’s sales team to say they would pull their ads if the company did not take action against the fakes.
The threats fueled Musk’s fear that he could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in an instant. “Shut it down,” he told an engineer in the San Francisco office. “Shut it down!”
Thousands of these AI-powered videos, known as deepfakes, have flooded the internet in recent months, showing fake versions of Musk that have deceived numerous potential investors. Deloitte estimates that AI-powered deepfakes are likely to result in billions of dollars in fraud losses each year. The videos cost just a few dollars to produce and can be created in minutes. They are promoted on social media, including in paid ads on Facebook, which increases their reach.
