Elon Musk’s Twitter Strip New York Times of Verified Checkmark

Elon Musk ordered his company, Twitter, to strip the New York Times of their verified check mark with immediate effect – and it appears he targeted them out of pure grudge.

Here’s the deal…the NYT lost its blue/gold checkmark on Sunday (we can’t even track the colors anymore), which guaranteed verification and authenticated the account as a legitimate news organization. The timing and reason is no secret… Elon made the call from the top.

The reason we know this is because EM himself commented on the state of The Times from his personal Twitter account, kind of shitting on it…literally. He writes, “The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting.”

Elon adds, “Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable. They’d have a lot more real followers if they only posted their best stories. The same goes for all posts. ” BTW, The Times is the only major legacy news company. losing his check so far.

Now, as to why the NYT was pretty clearly singled out… well, it looks like Elon has been told that they’ve publicly stated they won’t be shelling out to pay their gold check in the future – something all businesses will now do at a rate of $1,000/month.

They said publicly last week… “We do not plan to pay the monthly fee for verifying our institutional Twitter accounts.” They also said they wouldn’t reimburse most employees for their own verified accounts either…except for a select few.

They were far from the only media companies to say something similar, FWIW – CNN, WaPo and the LA Times (to name a few) are planning to do the same…AKA, no to pay.

However, in what appear to be since-deleted tweets from Elon…he was only told about the provocative stance of the Times, specifically – and based on these screenshots from Twitter sleuths, it appears that he may have taken it personally and pulled the trigger early.

One of his alleged tweets says he’ll give people a few weeks to make the switch (to pay $8/month or $1,000/month) but when he learned the NYT had already dug in the heels… he seems to have said, “OH YEAH?!?” Wouldn’t you know – now NYT is unverified.