I know Stephen King has lived the hardscrabble blue collar struggling artist life, and I'd guess he's been one Larry Underwood Lost Weekend away from losing everything at least once since making it big, when he was younger and wilder.

But I'm pretty sure at this stage of his life, if he lost his house, he could write a new one, and wouldn't have to wait long for an advance. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is cash poor and over-leveraged his best asset to close a deal he desperately wanted out of for "control" of Twitter

Stephen King isn't haggling over a $240/year price tag. He's making a principled stand about the direction in which money should flow when someone is producing content for someone else's commercial project.

This principle is very much not about the money (for him; upholding it helps protect authors who aren't Stephen King). This is a man who famously licenses his out-of-contract stories to film students for $1.

"The dollar that makes it legal" is a sort of talisman in Hollywood common law, as seen in the Breaking Bad universe when Saul Goodman insists on physically taking possession of a piece of paper money from the violent man who abducted him to make the seal of privilege official.

But I'm pretty sure -- though IANAL (and also, separately, I am not a lawyer) and contract lawyers may correct me -- that it would be possible to give someone a license with a binding contract attached that did not require money to change hands.

The other terms of the Dollar Baby license, as I recall, are that the resulting film may not be commercially exploited or exhibited without further explicit permission negotiated separately, and that the filmmaker sends a video of it to the author.

In short: it's "Yeah, you can use my short stories for your student films if you ask me permission, don't try to sell the results, and let me see what you've done with it when you're finished." with the symbolic price of $1 attached, a bit of principle on principle.

Does this sound like a man who is objecting to being asked to pay $20 because of sticker shock? He's not going to be talked down to $8 or to $1, because of the principle, which is: his words and his time and his creative output and his name and even his mere presence have worth.

I've been a customer of Twitter's Twitter Blue service since last month, because I have ADHD and using Twitter bookmarks to keep track of references, good advice/hacks, and stuff I want to thread on doesn't work without the ability to organize them. That's worth $5 to me.

If Stephen King had a use for Twitter Blue services (I don't think he's That Online, much less That Ontwitter), he might find that worth paying $5, or $8, or even $20, because it's all one banana to him.

But asking him to pay to establish his identity over words he writes on this site, which benefits from the drawing power of his name... that violates a principle. It would be like if he went into a bookstore in Maine and offered to sign his books and the owner asked for a bond.

The thing is that while I don't think Stephen King will cave... there is a ready-made customer base of people who think it is an absolutely brilliant move to buy an overhyped status symbol from Elon Musk just to prove they have the money to do so.

Anyway. I'm not Stephen King or Elon Musk. Twitter is a work environment for me, which is why I find it worthwhile to pay a small fee for access to additional organizational service. If that fee goes up as part of merging it with now super-questionable "verification"...

I mean, when I signed up for Twitter Blue, before I knew how useful I would find it or not, I said, at least I'll have a subscription to cancel if Elon Musk does close the deal. But it's proven so helpful that I'm inclined to continue. And now he's planning to wreck it.

@AlexandraErin @courtneymilan Musk's money is mostly smoke and mirrors relying on Tesla's ridiculous stock price.

@Cdbrow1 @courtneymilan Which is why it's really good for him he didn't destabilize the price by staking a bunch of his stock in a ridiculously ill-conceived, ego-driven venture.

@AlexandraErin This gets you a follow

@AlexandraErin Musk just spent 40 billion for fun 😂 king could live a hundred lifetimes and it wouldn’t compare