'Turn it off, Turn it off!' Musk wanted to pull the plug on THIS Twitter feature, book claims

Elon Musk took no time to introduce the blue checkmark scheme, called Twitter Blue after he took over the social media company in 2022. While he had dreams of gathering a lot of money from it, a new book claims he instantly regretted introducing it.

Under the scheme, he planned to award a blue tick mark to anyone who was willing to pay a fee. These users will ideally be termed as "verified users", even though their identity has never actually been verified.

An upcoming book titled Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitterdetails how the scheme fell flat and instead of adding to the bank, aggravated the company's financial crisis. Reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger state in the book that the blue tick mark became a hassle as its rolling out coincided with the US midterm elections.

The 2022 midterm elections happened on November 8, and a day later Musk introduced Twitter Blue and started charging people for it. However, problems began when several accounts showing as verified started posing as celebrities, politicians, companies and more. An account reflecting as Nintendo on X even shared an image of Super Mario giving the finger. It went viral.

Twitter's sales teams were bombarded with calls from advertisers who were not happy with the fake profiles showing up as verified. They threatened to pull their ads. This included multi-billion dollar companies, such as Nike, who wanted to quit the platform forever, Mac and Conger report.

Musk grew fearful amid the threats and reportedly told an engineer, "Turn it off, Turn it off!"

Musk's acquisition of Twitter

The SpaceX CEO had grand dreams for Twitter, now X when he took over. However, the sale led him to borrow around $13 billion to pay $44 billion in acquisition money. So the finances were already a mess.

Reports suggest that many advertisers have left X because of disinformation and hate speeches on the platform.

The Wall Street Journal recently termed the acquisition the "worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis". Musk has been venting out against advertisers for pulling out. He even filed an antitrust lawsuit against the advertising trade group The World Federation of Advertisers.

Musk has also resorted to mass layoffs to cut down on costs and even failed to pay rent for several offices across the world.