‘I think the blue checks are Elon bros’: Stephen King responds to ‘brain dead’ takes forgetting he’s got one, too

The blue checkmark fiasco is one of the most ridiculous things to have ever happened to social media, which is saying something when it can be described as a lawless hellscape at the best of times, with Stephen King ending up caught in the middle as Elon Musk unleashed his inner fanboy.

The company CEO’s decision to charge users for verification almost instantly backfired and gave rise to an unstoppable volume of parody accounts, with countless celebrities and high-profile public figures quite simply refusing to fork over any cash to the Chief Twit in order to prove they were in fact who they claimed to be.

Instead, Musk opted to pay for A-list verified status out of his own pocket, reinstalling a huge amount of blue checks, often without letting the subjects in question know. King was one of just many, and yet you can’t help but pick up trace amounts of irony in one of his more recent posts, where he named “Elon bros” as ones with blue ticks, even though he’s technically one of the biggest seeing as it’s Elon himself that’s paying for his.

Trying to predict what’s going to happen in the Wild West of Twitter on any given day is a guessing game with no outcome that can be described as victorious, but King railing on the bros while existing as a bro – albeit under circumstances he had no control over – is enough to make your head spin.

That’s the way of the Twitter world, though, so it’s best to just soldier on and go with the flow, because trying to figure it out is a fool’s game.