You Know Who ELSE Cost Eli Lilly Billions Of Insulin Dollars??

As Yr Wonkette discussed last week, billionaire idiot idiot Elon Musk (he’s like an idiot savant, but all idiot) had to “pause” his experiment with letting anyone on Twitter pay $8 to get a “verified” account, with the blue checkmark that proves you’re exactly who you say you are, because hundreds of people were creating fake accounts and creating very funny havoc pretending to be celebrities, corporations, and of course Elon Musk himself. You’d think a guy who considered himself a master shitposter and troll would have thought that through, but then, Musk has more money than sense, so he fires the people who are supposed to think things through for him.

Read More! Twitter Blue ‘Paused’ After Thing Everyone Said Would Happen Happened

As we noted, among the many dumb spoofs and madcap tomfoolery, some wag came up with a tweet that was roughly equivalent to letting the pigeon drive the bus, only instead of a bus it was the market capitalization of one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, Eli Lilly and Company. The fake account, with a very official-looking name and very official-looking blue checkmark, twote, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now,” setting off panic selling of Lilly stocks and a whole bunch of other fake Lilly accounts, because for eight bucks, you too could crash the market value of a global megacorporation.

Honestly, it’s difficult to say how much real money (as if the stock market is “real”) the $8 fake tweet ended up costing Lilly. Gizmodo’s cautious estimate is “a fuckton”:

Google analytics shows that after that initial tweet and subsequent copycat accounts, the pharma company’s stock sank from $368 a share to $346 a share, which according to economic reports at the time—reportedly erased billions in market cap. The company had been on an upward trend over the past several months but it has not yet recovered to its original price as of reporting Monday morning.

So far, Lilly isn’t telling media outlets how much the prank cost it, instead making confident predictions it will be fine, OK, fine.

The Washington Post reports that the tweet sent real Lilly execs into a “panic,” according to insiders, especially because of another Galaxy Brain decision Musk had made.

Company officials scrambled to contact Twitter representatives and demanded they kill the viral spoof, worried it could undermine their brand’s reputation or push false claims about people’s medicine. Twitter, its staffing cut in half, didn’t react for hours.

Following the debacle, Lilly made the entirely sensible decision to pause all advertising on Twitter, which the Post reports could really be another funny thing for Musk to laugh about, because

the $330 billion company controls the kind of massive advertising budget that Musk says the company needs to avoid bankruptcy. They also paused their Twitter publishing plan for all corporate accounts around the world.

“For $8, they’re potentially losing out on millions of dollars in ad revenue,” said Amy O’Connor, a former senior communications official at Eli Lilly who now works at a trade association. “What’s the benefit to a company … of staying on Twitter? It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line.”

We bet there’s a meme that might make all that more palatable to Musk. Maybe Pepe the Frog saying “Feels bad, man.”

The fuck-tussle also provided the opportunity for dirty rotten capitalism haters like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to point out that hey, maybe Eli Lilly doesn’t need to be making obscene profits off a product that costs about $10 per dose to manufacture.

Let’s be clear. Eli Lilly should apologize for increasing the price of insulin by over 1,200% since 1996 to $275 while it costs less than $10 to manufacture. The inventors of insulin sold their patents in 1923 for $1 to save lives, not to make Eli Lilly’s CEO obscenely rich.

At least that got Musk’s attention because not only is he sensitive to people making fun of him, he also has an instinctual need to defend other billionaires and big corporations. The world’s richest man insisted that it’s perfectly fine for Lilly to charge what it has to because it’s so expensive to make its new improved insulin products, hooray for the free market.

As Gizmodo points out, that got the Bird Man a fact check pointing out that while Lilly charges upwards of $99 per unit in the USA, the same product in other nations is subject to price controls, and goes for a bit over $9. It’s not as big a ratio as the amount of losses Lilly suffered to the price of a fake account, but pretty impressive.

Moar! Moar!

Senate Republicans Triumph Over Affordable Insulin

Grandma Loves Overpaying For Prescription Drugs? The GOP’s Got Her Covered

Also too, let’s point out that with the Inflation Reduction Act this summer, Joe Biden and congressional Democrats capped the copayment for insulin for Medicare patients at $35 per month. The bill also included a similar cap for everyone not on Medicare, but then Republicans voted to kill that portion of the bill because, under Senate rules, they could. And in fact they’ve pledged to roll back all the medical savings in the IRA if they ever have the presidency and control of Congress again.

Man, we wish that were just a mean fake tweet, but it’s real.

[Gizmodo / WaPo]

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