Twitter started reissuing its Blue Tick for free to some celebrities and other users with large follower populations in what would normally be considered a humiliating backdown, over the weekend.  But as this is Elon Musk we are talking about, shame doesn't enter into it.

Once a symbol of social media cachet due to fact that Twitter carefully curated who received the endorsement, blue tick ownership now is emerging amongst some of Twitter's verbose cohorts as a source of embarrassment. As Jimmy Kimmel (11.6M followers), one of the celebrities whose blue tick was restored noted, "This genius managed to change what was the status symbol blue checkmark into the internet equivalent of a cold sore on your lip."

The move came as it became clear Musk's plans to force existing Blue Ticks to pay has so far failed spectacularly.

Most of the blue ticks who subscribed had done so before the cut off on Friday. Of the hold outs, the percentage who subscribed on the day after the cut was a fraction* of 1 per cent for the net gain of 28 subscribers.

According to Travis Brown, a computer programmer who has been tracking the status of verified users for his blog: "Update for the day after: just before the purge yesterday, 19,469 of the 407k legacy verified accounts I had identified in early April had Twitter Blue. Today that number for those same accounts is 19,497, for a net increase of 28 accounts."

At this rate, Musk will recover the $US44Bn he paid for Twitter from these subscription fees alone in 23,500 years.

Full steam ahead, but in reverse

By Sunday Twitter was in partial retreat, reissuing blue ticks to some of its larger accounts who confirmed on the platform they neither paid for the accounts or asked for it to be reinstalled, including author Stephen King (7.1M followers) actors Ian McCellen (4M) and Jason Alexander (740k) and online activists Anonymous (7.M) - the latter had been running a campaign mocking people who paid for the tick.

Barack Obama (123M) and Donald Trump (87.1M) were likewise reinstated (in Trump's case this is despite the fact he refuses to use the platform, as he owns a competitor, Truth Social).

There were also some jarring examples, including the account of murdered Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Musk has grown closer to the Saudi leadership class in recent months. His Twitter purchase was partially funded by Alwaleed bin Talal, the founder of  Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Co, and now Twitter's second largest shareholder who agreed to roll his $1.9bn personal stake into the newly privatised business, after having first opposed the deal. 

*In net terms, seven one thousandths of one percent, to be precise.