Elon Musk reacts to Stephen King saying he won’t pay for Twitter blue check

Horror novelist Stephen King says he will refuse to pay for a monthly subscription to keep his verified status on Twitter, but Elon Musk responded that the company’s grisly finances give him no choice but to charge a fee.

King, the author of bestselling classics such as “The Shining,” “Salem’s Lot,” “Misery,” and “Pet Sematary,” took to Twitter on Monday and made clear his feelings on Musk’s reported plan to begin charging verified Twitter users a monthly fee.

“$20 a month to keep my blue check?” King tweeted. “F–k that, they should pay me.”

“If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron,” King added, referring to the infamous energy company that went belly up in the early 2000s.

Musk, Twitter’s new “Chief Twit” who recently completed his acquisition of the social media site and fired its top executives, responded to King early Tuesday.

$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) October 31, 2022

“We need to pay the bills somehow!” Musk wrote to King. “Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?”

In a subsequent tweet, Musk wrote: “I will explain the rationale in longer form before this is implemented. It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls.”

Musk has reportedly given his employees an edict to come up with a plan for the new subscription service within days — or get fired.

Musk last week officially assumed control of Twitter, a site with more than 237 million daily active users that has historically struggled to monetize its content despite its significant influence on the public discourse.

The company’s most recent earnings report showed a net loss of $270 million — a sharp swing from the $66 million in profit from a year prior.

Twitter also reported $1.18 billion in revenue, which is down more than 1% year-over-year.

Musk’s plan to generate revenue by charging blue checks a subscription fee was met with backlash from prominent figures, including CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

“I’m not paying them anything. They should pay me,” the “Mad Money” host said on Monday.

Cramer’s co-anchor David Faber agreed, saying: “I’m not paying Twitter more than I’m paying Netflix every month.”