Musk Tries To Confront Bernie Sanders Over Rising Insulin Prices, Twitter Community Comes To The Rescue

It all started as a prank.

Damjan

• Published in Interesting
• December 6, 2022

Elon Musk has been in the public relations industry for a long time and has mastered the art of taking on several personas. For a while, he was seen as a sort of Tony Stark prototype—"genius, millionaire, playboy, philanthropist"—but then the day came when Musk was taken seriously as a kind of the equivalent of the legendary King Midas, who transformed everything he touched into gold.

But now that 2022 has here, it's time for a fresh look... Most of what Musk has said and done this year is consistent with the paradigm of traditional tricksters, such as Loki, who is found in Scandinavian mythology rather than Marvel comics.

A being whose primary objective is to generate chaos—not for the sake of good or evil, but rather because the act of creating chaos is more important than the result. In other words, a lovely intellect devoid of accountability. Another incident, or rather a fresh iteration of the incident involving the blue Twitter badges that Elon Musk started peddling for $8 each, demonstrates how even seemingly innocent gags and practical jokes may significantly impact the state of the modern world.

This time, it concerns something that is so important to so many people.

Elon Musk recently decided to sell Twitter "blue credentials" for $8 each

Therefore, once Musk decided to sell blue badges, there was initially a surge of outrage, such as a series of articles from Stephen King, and then internet users developed a new approach to compete with Twitter.

People started purchasing account verification and named them after companies so that they seemed to be legitimate corporate sites. But then, a surge of absurd, caustic, and plainly offensive tweets from these same accounts—including, incidentally, the bogus Tesla page—rose.

Insulin is free!

At first glance, everything appeared to be a funny, practical joke—that is, until the false Eli Lilly account said that insulin would be free going forward. Of course, very few people actually believed in such a philanthropic assault, but just in case, investors and traders started to dump business shares worldwide.

As a result, Eli Lilly's stock fell by 4.5%, lowering the company's market value by around $16 billion, according to a number of sources.

Apologies...

That's not all, though

US Senator Bernie Sanders weighed in, writing that Eli Lilly should have apologized in the first place for the fact that since 1996, they have increased the price of insulin by more than 1,200% while the cost is less than $10.

After Eli Lilly's official Twitter account responded, apologizing for the unintentional misinformation associated with the brand. The senator pointed out that when the insulin creators sold their patents for $1 in 1923, they did so to save lives rather than to benefit the CEO of Eli Lilly.

Musk responded

Musk got into a debate with Senator Bernie Sanders on insulin pricing

And then suddenly got fact-checked by the Twitter team

Here it goes:

True:

Good for him

US insulin prices:

This is so sad

What are they apologizing for?

Insulin prices in the US are crazy

Big money

So sad...

$17 billion for just $8? Not bad...

Go figure...

Class solidarity

He could've...

Sounds interesting...

Two things:

More than 7 million Americans have diabetes and need to take insulin daily. During the past ten years, the drug's price has increased dramatically.

According to Yale University research, more than 14% of Americans who use insulin spend at least 40% of their available income on it. And that is simply terrible.

Damjan