Stephen King Threatens to Quit Twitter, Suggests Musk’s Company Should Pay Him
Scott Eisen/Getty Images for Warner Bros.
Stephen King is insisting he could be quitting Twitter, a platform where he has nearly seven million followers.
King’s issue with the platform under new owner Elon Musk are reports that the app could soon be charging $20 a month for users to carry a verification blue check on their profile. King doesn’t plan on adding Twitter to his subscription services and insisted that Musk’s platform should actually be paying him.
“$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron,” the horror novelist and activist tweeted on Monday evening.
$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) October 31, 2022
King’s concerns actually got the attention of Musk, who offered the It author a discount and confirmed charges for blue checks could be coming.
“We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” Musk tweeted.
We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
In a followup message, he claimed changing the verification system is the only way to “defeat the bots & trolls,” a major issue the Tesla founder has had with Twitter.
I will explain the rationale in longer form before this is implemented. It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
King also spent his Halloween night apparently dipping his toe into the Truth Social waters as he grew increasingly dissatisfied with Twitter.
“I got the Truth Social app. It’s amazing. The ads alone are more fucked up than Peter O’Toole on his birthday. Spoiler alert: [Donald] Trump can’t spell for shit,” the author wrote.
He specifically highlighted a message from Trump in which the former president referred to the 2020 presidential election as “rigged and stollen.”
“Dere Rupublickums: Don’t vote for a man who cant spell. If yew can’t spell yew can’t think,” King posted to Musk’s Twitter.
Dere Rupublickums: Don’t vote for a man who cant spell. If yew can’t spell yew cant think.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) October 31, 2022
