re: Elon Musk and Stephen King haggle over $12 on Twitter

quote:

---

That's what he said, but not sure how. You're just going to have more people without blue check marks that don't want to pay 20 dollars a month.

---

Have to understand the angle Elon is coming from here.

There are roughly only 400k verified accounts on twitter, out of about 400 million active accounts. So they make up literally a tenth of 1 percent of all active accounts.

By far and large, the people with blue check marks are businesses or high net worth individuals since they want to make sure their likely large follower audience knows it's them. At $5/mo currently it's an absolute no brainer for all these people to have the blue check mark.

For these businesses or high net worth individuals, $20 a month is still mostly a joke and an easy sell ultimately. Elon will price it down to find a breakeven point of losing too many + generating revenue, but keep in mind, Twitter made $5B in revenue last year. Even if he charged $8 a verified account a month that's only $14.4M a year in additional revenue (over the $5 current price), which is kind of a drop in the bucket of a $5B/yr company. Even if he did do $20/mo and 200k of the 400k accounts paid for that's $48M total revenue a year, again a drop in the bucket but actually more than 400k people @ $8 a month.

The $20 price was always supposed to be a shock value to start the process of figuring out where it should be. Very common business tactic of pricing.

People like Stephen King complaining about spending $20/mo from $5/mo when they are worth half a billion is just major

People like Stephen King wouldnt leave twitter on something he would never notice in his bank account. He would leave because he hates Elon.

Inflation…

quote:

---

Twitter made $5B in revenue last year. Even if he charged $8 a verified account a month that's only $14.4M a year in additional revenue (over the $5 current price), which is kind of a drop in the bucket of a $5B/yr company.

---

So then what's the point? Blue checks are likely a big driver of traffic to the site so I don't really see the point of nickel and diming them for 0.3% of revenue.

It's just another of Elon's half-baked thinking out loud moments. Probably won't mean a hill of beans in the long run but just like everything so far with this deal, it's been seat of the pants stuff that's hasn't used his, or his financiers', capital most efficiently.

quote:

---

I’ve read his books for 5 or 6 years

---

Tim Pool says that Steven King had other people write his books for him. He isn't even the real author.