Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, ranted today about the New York Times and took away its blue check. He was taking revenge after the company said it wouldn't pay for verification, thereby diminishing the likelihood that other companies might.
The New York Times, along with several other organisations and celebrities, said they would not pay for the tick. It prompted Elon Musk to launch a volley of insults at the newspaper. "The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn't even interesting", Mr Musk, who owns Twitter, wrote on the platform. "Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It's unreadable," he added. There has been no official comment from Twitter and the New York Times has not responded to Mr Musk's comments.
I love how childish and petty it is. There is no depth or human complexity to Musk whatsoever: he's just a rich kid who got lucky and now we marvel at his exertions day in, day out. The New York Times still casts Musk as a public intellectual, even now, because its editors live in a floating world of narrative imagination and are impervious to the facts of the matter. In return, he calls it "diarrhea." They completely deserve one another.
