By 
“‘Pretty soon the only advertiser left on Twitter will be MyPillow.’”
— Stephen King, on Twitter
That was master of horror and bestselling fiction writer Stephen King riffing on the parade of advertisers including GM
GM,
-0.65%,
United Airlines
UAL,
+0.85%
and Audi
VOW,
-1.69%
pausing or scrapping their marketing on the social-media platform since Tesla
TSLA,
+5.94%
and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took over.
It’s not the first time that King has called out Musk’s rocky $44 billion purchase of Twitter, which has seen mass layoffs and resignations that have had users tweeting “RIP Twitter,” and signing up for rival social sites like Hive Social, Mastodon and Post in case Twitter collapses. What’s more, the upgraded Twitter Blue subscription service has been off to a rocky start, and repeatedly delayed.
Read more: Twitter layoffs continue under Elon Musk; another delay for Twitter Blue
King was one of the first boldface names threatening to leave Twitter if Musk’s plan to have verified users pay $20 a month (later reduced to $8) to keep their blue check mark came to pass.
Read more: What does Twitter verification really mean? And what may happen to it?
King tweeted in late October, “$20 a month to keep my blue check? F— that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.” That post went viral, and led Musk to respond by tweeting, “We need to pay the bills somehow. Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers.”
Musk also threw out a lower price at the time: “How about $8?”
This is perhaps why Musk responded to King’s most recent tweet about MyPillow with “Oh hi lol.”
Musk followed up by asking, “Is My Pillow actually a great pillow? Now I’m curious.”
It should be noted that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been permanently banned from Twitter — twice — for pushing misinformation by spreading baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. He is also facing a lawsuit from a voting-machine company he accused of altering vote counts.
Lindell told Business Insider in an interview posted the day before Thanksgiving that he is hoping Musk will reverse his Twitter ban — as the new Twitter CEO did for former President Donald Trump earlier this month — saying, “I’d fly to him, do whatever it takes.”
As for Twitter’s advertising woes, more than a third of the site’s top 100 marketers have not advertised on the social network in the past two weeks, according to a Washington Post analysis of marketing data published during the Thanksgiving week, including blue-chip brands Jeep and Mars candy, Kellogg
K,
-0.31%,
Verizon
VZ,
-1.22%,
Sam Adams brewer Boston Beer
SAM,
+0.03%
and pharmaceutical company Merck
MRK,
-0.14%.
Read on:
The MarginOAN’s ‘Absolute Proof’ disclaimer is getting more buzz on Twitter than Mike ‘MyPillow Guy’ Lindell’s movie itself
Supreme Court won’t hear MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s defamation case
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