But there is another possible reason Eli Lilly is making this change: Elon Musk’s bumbling of the Twitter Blue verification rollout, and one guy from Queens who decided to exploit it to troll Eli Lilly.
In early November 2022, Twitter started offering verified checkmarks to paid $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscribers. The first few days were an undisputed disaster, with impersonators running roughshod all over the timeline. For example, a verified “Nintendo” account tweeted a picture of Mario giving the finger.
Sean Morrow, 34, a writer for the site More Perfect Union, also wanted to get in on the verification prank action. He switched the handle of an old novelty account he had to @EliLillyandCo and tweeted: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”
The tweet went viral, amplified by people who may have mistakenly believed it was real and those who understood it was a goof. Morrow deftly executed a dunk on both Eli Lilly (many believed that a corporation valued at $300 billion should already be making insulin free) and Musk’s Twitter for its poorly thought-out new feature.
Morrow doesn’t have diabetes, but he was compelled by the injustice of insulin pricing. “I always saw it as one of the worst corporate exploitations of everyone else in a world of terrible corporate exploitations of everyone else,” he told BuzzFeed News.