Elon Musk Barfs Out Another Half-Cooked Plan to Boost Tanking Revenue

Business super-genius Elon Musk rolled out yet another can’t-miss plan to save his foundering social media platform on Friday.

Twitter, now known as X, features two more subscription tiers in addition to X Premium, which costs $8 a month.

Oh, and he’s reportedly incentivizing Tucker Carlson to create more content on the platform.

The platform now offers a $16 subscription called Premium+ that gets users an ad-free experience, increased visibility, the ability to post longer videos, and a personal video recording of Musk laughing at them for 69 consecutive seconds. (I made one of those up.) Additionally, Twitter will offer a $3 subscription option for those who sign up through a browser.

CEO Linda Yaccarino, who is basically Dmitry Medvedev to Musk’s Vladimir Putin during that time when Putin couldn’t be president for four years, was brought in to assuage advertisers who had fled the platform. One of Musk’s, er, “her” solutions to this problem was to cut a revenue-sharing deal with Carlson, according to the Washington Post:

When Musk hired a new CEO, one of her first moves was to court former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to launch his new program on X, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive talks. Carlson and X signed a revenue-sharing deal earlier this month, The Post has learned.

As WaPo reporter as reporter Sarah Ellison speculated, this could mean “lots more Tucker content” on the platform.

That’s right. Carlson, whose former Fox News show was so toxic that only the My Pillow guy and a handful of companies you’ve never heard of would advertise on Fox News while it aired, is allegedly part of the grand plan to bring advertisers back to the Musk Midlife Crisis Corporation.

The revelation comes on the heels of an utterly disastrous appearance by Yaccarino at last month’s Code Conference. The supposedly media-savvy executive came off as impatient, irascible, and condescending. At one point, she stepped in proverbial dog doo-doo by asking the audience, “Who wouldn’t want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product?”

When some in the crowd inevitably raised their hands, Yaccarino became indignant.

“There may be a few show of hands to get the cute chuckles you’re getting,” she told interviewer Julia Boorstin. “But I would say the percentages in this room are about 99%, ‘who would say no to that?’ And 1% of, maybe personal opinion.”

Meanwhile, the platform is flooded with bogus information, misleading videos, and White supremacist rhetoric from accounts with blue checkmarks. One of Musk’s first major moves was to strip the blue checkmark from every account in favor of the $8 Premium plan. Predictably, numerous imposter accounts popped up purporting to be famous people or companies. In response, Musk restored the blue checkmarks to the really famous people and companies at no cost, but he continued insisting the plebes pay up.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that doling out scores of “verified” badges to accounts with handles like @HotRod69_420 damages the credibility of the site. The old system wasn’t perfect by any means, but it made it a hell of a lot easier to find information from trusted sources. That’s gone now. For example, when news breaks, users must scroll and sift through a torrent of sludge from blue checkmarks like the aforementioned HotRod making definitive claims about important developments or posting videos purporting to be authentic or relevant to the news event.

Shortly after Musk acquired Twitter last year, I wrote a one-word column explaining what he’s doing “right” at the company (nothing). And I knew he would continue doing nothing right. But as a longtime critic of Musk, not even I thought he would sabotage it this badly and in such a short period of time.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.