You couldn’t stage a worse corporate car crash if you tried, but you are not the self-styled marketing genius who thinks he’s mankind’s best hope for colonizing Mars. And we haven’t even gotten to the elephant in the room: Twitter, a company that was hemorrhaging money to begin with, now has to come up with a billion dollars of non-existent revenue just to pay the interest on the loans Musk has now saddled it with.
In short, Musk still needs a way to come up with a lot of money very fast. He also seems devoted to only doing things that make Twitter much, much worse—but we can work with that. Shall we help him out?
Here you go, Elon. Here are some surefire ways to make a lot of money with Twitter now that you own it. And we can promise you this: Each one of them will make Twitter an even worse hellsite than it currently is.
What Elon should do:Â New Twitter Invisi-Blue
Musk made a big and horrible splash with a new service that allowed any user to get coveted important-person status by handing over $8 per month. That’s created a new problem, though: People who might genuinely want features new “Twitter Blue” status provides now have to deal with a checkmark that all but screams Elon Fanboy.
The solution is simple. Announcing new Twitter Invisi-Blue: For a mere $10 per month, you can hide the blue checkmark that the $8 per month Twitter Blue put on your account, thus hiding from the world the embarrassment of revealing that you gave Elon Musk money.
What Elon will probably do instead:
Reinstate Donald Trump, then start paying Trump $1 million per month to tweet things after Trump refuses to do so.
What Elon should do: New Pay-to-Troll Features
As the rollout of Musk’s first new revenue sucker proved, there’s not much that users want from Twitter that they’re willing to pay money for. There are many people, however, who jumped at the chance to pay $8 to commit a bit of impersonation or straight-up identity theft. There’s your market, Elon, and your only chance at turning a profit: Allow users to post tweets under the account of any other Twitter user for the low, low price of $20 per tweet. Want to humiliate Nintendo? $20. Want to send a major pharmaceutical company’s stock price into the toilet for a day? $20. Want to pretend you just won an argument with Stephen King? $20 and it’s yours.
What Elon will probably do instead:
Announce he doesn’t need human content moderators anymore because he has designed a new line of robots that can do it instead. At the press conference announcing the change, the “robot” will clearly be a human male in a costume consisting of assorted computer parts duct-taped to a black spandex bodysuit. It will not be spoken of again.
What Elon should do: Twitter PrimeIdentityTheft Day(TM)
On the first Monday of every third month, everyone’s Twitter account will be randomized so that you’re posting for the day as someone else. Could be the account of someone famous. Could be the account of Twitter Pornbot No. 5587225. This one won’t generate any direct revenue, but it will be fun for all (most) ages, create a great deal of publicity each time, and make everybody feel good because we’re all one big happy family of identity thieves. People will post more, and advertisers will love it and come back in droves.
What Elon will probably do instead:
Your Twitter Blue account will now be linked to Tesla’s autopilot databases, and Tesla automobiles will be programmed to prioritize the safety of Twitter Blue-registered pedestrians over other pedestrians.
What Elon should do:Â New Twitter UnTweet
There are some tweets that are so bad that they cause psychological damage to anyone who reads them. For $20 per tweet, the holder of a Twitter Blue or Twitter Invisi-Blue account can delete somebody else’s tweet. If the tweeter is also a paid account holder, they can pay $20 to put the tweet back. You can’t pay to delete the same tweet more than once, but if multiple people all pay $20 to delete the tweet, it will stay deleted unless the original tweeter coughs up the same number of twenties.
What Elon will probably do instead:
Announce that anyone with a Twitter Blue account now has automatic Martian citizenship, thus granting them diplomatic immunity and freeing them from the constraints of Earth-based law.
What Elon should do: Shenanigans
We’ve already established that there’s really no way Elon can make a profit off pay-to-play Twitter unless he capitalizes on all the people who want to use it for identity theft. Fine, then, let’s go nuts. Upon a duly witnessed declaration of shenanigans and an acknowledgment of the declaration of shenanigans from the accused, the target of the shenanigans declaration will have their Twitter account frozen—and put up for public auction. Twitter gets the profits, and the winning bidder gets the account.
See an account that’s just so terrible that you just … don’t want it to exist anymore? Call shenanigans, and bid for the right to take that username for yourself. Tweet as Nintendo, not just once but from here on in. Take over an anti-LGBT hate account and turn it into a book review club. This will clean Twitter up quickly because, as we all know, the people who have the most money are always the people with the best opinions.
The short-term result will be the decimation of white nationalist accounts because none of those people have five dollars to their name, and empty beer cans don’t count. The long-term result will be a paradise of richer and richer people admiring each other in richer and richer ways, and Twitter will eventually be ruled by the world’s 100 richest corporations and royal families, each with a million admiring sockpuppet accounts to their name.
What Elon will probably do instead:
Uh … put Twitter in a tunnel to make it go faster?
