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Today, Elon Musk Deployed This Strategy to Get Journos Off His Tail
He changed his display name on X. (If you’re at work, don’t look.)
In the days of Old Twitter, important people could apply for a blue-check icon, which meant their identity would be verified by a real process behind the scenes. Big-name journalists, for example, wanted to do this so their readers would know when they were reading a tweet from the real journalist and not an impersonator. Once you were verified (should you be so lucky), your real name would display on Twitter. Unlike the riff-raff, you could no longer change your display name back-and-forth as a joke. But you had the status symbol of a blue-check.
Nowadays, of course, a blue-check just means you pay Elon Musk a few dollars a month.
Today, Elon himself changed his display name on X. There may be any number of reasons why this man — the richest man in the world, and a gloating white supremacist — behaves like a 12-year-old boy on social media. Let me propose a reason why he made this particular NSFW name change.
