LeBron James, William Shatner, Seinfeld actor Jason Alexander, and other athletes and celebrities with millions of followers say they won't pay for Twitter Blue
TechCrunchAmanda Silberling
Context & Ripple Effects
The refusal by prominent accounts landed alongside resistance from major news organizations to buying or reimbursing Twitter Blue, including the newsroom pushback on Blue payments. That made the subscription offer a test of whether existing status holders would convert into paying customers.
The dispute did not end with the initial objections: later coverage showed Twitter offering LeBron James a complimentary subscription and restoring checkmarks to many large accounts despite denials that they had paid. Those follow-ups underscore the tension between subscription revenue and the visibility of the verification system.
First-order effects
Twitter Blue loses a highly visible set of potential subscribers as LeBron James, William Shatner, Jason Alexander and other large-following accounts publicly decline to pay.
The public refusals make a paid checkmark less likely to function as a universal marker for established celebrities, leaving Twitter to manage the status of influential non-subscribers.
Second-order effects
Other publishers, creators and public figures gain cover to reject Blue or decline to expense it, extending the resistance already visible among news organizations.
Twitter faces pressure to distinguish paid subscribers from prominent legacy-verified accounts without turning verification changes into repeated public disputes; the later restoration of checkmarks to 1M-plus-follower accounts illustrates that pressure.
Third-order effects
If major public figures continue to reject paid verification, platforms may have to separate identity verification from subscription perks rather than rely on a single paid badge for both.
The episode points to a broader constraint on subscription-led social products: monetization features tied to public status can lose value when the people who confer that status refuse to participate.
The trend: Social platforms are testing subscriptions as a revenue source, but converting identity and visibility features into paid products risks resistance from the high-profile users who make those signals valuable.
1) As someone who was (briefly) in charge of the Twitter Media team - the group tasked with getting high profile people onto Twitter, and verification - AND as one of the few ever to voluntarily give up the blue check, I want to try to articulate how risky this policy change is. …
When the guy who used to run *ticketmaster* tells you you're about to piss a lot of people off and possibly ruin your corporation's public standing, maybe heed that. https://twitter.com/...
Bye bye blue check! Supposedly you'll be gone at midnight. I've been verified since 2014ish & it's been nice—helpful in my business too in a number of ways. But now I'm expected to pay to keep it?! NOPE. https://techcrunch.com/...
“Elon Musk's Twitter fundamentally misunderstands what made Twitter useful in the first place.” “Allowing users to buy these features makes them useless or even counterproductive.” https://www.eff.org/...
It's a “Martin” reference.... And the whole point of verification is to make sure public figures that post are really who is posting. Overtime people turned it into a weird status symbol. I don't care many millions I got, why would I pay for something specifically used for free? …
Imagine how much it would cost to hire LeBron James to write content for your website. Imagine miraculously getting him to do it for free. Imagine then driving him away from your website so you can fail to collect $96 from him annually https://twitter.com/...
I've enjoyed my checkmark that I was given through the application process, but in no world will I be paying for it. Twitter's about to become an absolute mess, so - legitimately - what other platform are we needing to move to? https://twitter.com/...
incredible to have handled this so badly that celebrities, or their teams, are going out of their way to post about how they won't buy your product, on your product, in order to make themselves look cool to the other users of your product https://twitter.com/...
Players always say Lebron doesn't even pay for data roaming and will wait forever to get to a place with wifi because he refuses to do that extra cost....so this definitely tracks 😂 https://twitter.com/...
I like that every major decision that Musk makes involves a different celebrity boss level. First Stephen King and now William Shatner. https://twitter.com/...
our profile on sam altman, who fears the dystopian potential of AI but has done more than anyone else to develop it on the way, he fended off elon musk, who called a young researcher a “jackass” at an all-hands before leaving OpenAI w/ @keachhagey https://www.wsj.com/...
Friends, there are bigger issues in the 🌎than the blue verified ✔️next to my name on this account. But without it, anyone can allege to be me. So, if I lose that ✔️ know I will leave this platform. Anyone appearing with it=an imposter. I tell you this while I'm still official.
Say what you will about Elon, but it is truly impressive to be so uncool to your very core that despite every potential resource on the planet at your disposal you still make a service so spectacularly lame that guys who make 50 mil a year will make a point not to give you $8 htt…
Much more importantly, the $8 version won't actually tell you if that Kardashian is the real one. She'd have to register the family business for $1k/month and each member for $50/month to get some kind of distinctive marker. https://twitter.com/...
This is avoidable, but Elon/Twitter just don't want to do the work. And it will backfire in entirely predictable ways, including on Twitter's value. https://twitter.com/...
i imagine more celebrities are going to be asking this when historical verified goes away — especially when all it will cost is eight bucks and a photo from google images to like impersonate Beyoncé for an hour hope Elon didn't fire his celebrity management division... https://tw…
already happening imo it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the value proposition— famous (and “famous") people provide more value to twitter just by being there because that is why people like you and me come to the service to read them not worth charging a kardashian 8 bux! h…