Elon Musk Fires Back At Stephen King's Blue Twitter Checkmark Criticism

Billionaire Elon Musk is already finding that his new takeover of Twitter is not going as smoothly as he had hoped.

The Tesla CEO is already looking to make changes to the social media platform that most are strictly opposed to. Many users rely on the blue Twitter checkmark in order to verify which accounts are authentic and which are not.

However, Musk's plan to charge users $20 dollars to keep their blue Twitter verification checkmark is causing many to see red, including "The Stand" author Stephen King.

On Monday, the "Carrie" author took to Twitter to criticize Musk's new plan to draw in more revenue for the social media company. "$20 a month to keep my blue check? F--- that, they should pay me," he tweeted. "If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron."

"That's a bit odd. You can well afford it," one user pointed out. However, King clarified, "It ain't the money, it's the principal of the thing."

It looks like the tweet caught Musk's attention, who commented on King's post, asking, "We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?"

He then followed it up, adding, "I will explain the rationale in longer form before this is implemented. It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls."

Elon Musk has long been critical of the number of bots and spam accounts on Twitter's platform. It was one of the reasons that the $44 billion dollar deal, which was first announced in April, took so long to go through. The SpaceX CEO tweeted that the deal was "on hold" several times and openly asserted that the number of bot and spam accounts was much higher than the 5% Twitter's previous CEO had been claiming.

It appears that Musk is already doing his best to crack down on the number of bot and spam accounts, as many users have noticed a sharp drop in Twitter followers over the past few days. "Star Wars" alum Mark Hamill was one of the first to comment on the sharp decrease in followers, tweeting, "So, I've lost almost 6000 followers in the last three days. Is it because of the new twit owner... or not posting enough cute animal videos lately?"

Although Musk has stated several times that he wants Twitter to be a bastion of "free speech," one social media research group told The Washington Post that the use of the N-word had increased by nearly 500% since Elon Musk took over Twitter.

The tweet even caught the attention of LeBron James, who tweeted, "I don't know Elon Musk and, tbh, I could care less who owns Twitter. But I will say that if this is true, I hope he and his people take this very seriously because this is scary AF. So many d--- unfit people saying hate speech is free speech."

Musk replied to James' post with a Twitter thread from Twitter Head of Safety & Security, Yoel Roth, who tweeted, "Nearly all of these accounts are inauthentic. We’ve taken action to ban the users involved in this trolling campaign — and are going to continue working to address this in the days to come to make Twitter safe and welcoming for everyone."