But there’s another possible reason Eli Lilly is making this change: Elon Musk’s clumsiness launching Twitter Blue verification, and some guy from Queens who decided to exploit it to troll Eli Lilly.
In early November 2022, Twitter began offering verified checkmarks to Twitter Blue subscribers who pay $8 per month. The early days were an undisputed disaster, with copycats bypassing the entire timeline. For example, a verified “Nintendo” account tweeted an image of Mario pointing his finger.
Sean Morrow, 34, a writer for the More Perfect Union site, also wanted to get in on the verification prank action. He changed the handle of an old novelty account he had to @EliLillyandCo and tweeted: “We are excited to announce that insulin is now free.”
The tweet went viral, amplified by people who may have mistakenly believed it was real and those who understood it to be nonsense. Morrow deftly executed a dunk on both Eli Lilly (many believed a $300 billion-valued corporation should be releasing insulin by now) and Musk’s Twitter for his ill-thought-out new feature.
Morrow does not have diabetes, but was forced by the unfairness of the price of insulin. “I always saw it as one of the worst corporate exploitations of everyone else in a world of terrible corporate exploitations of everyone else,” he told BuzzFeed News.