Eli Lilly Reduced The Price Of Insulin To $35 Per Month, And This Guy Who Trolled The Company Can Take Some Credit

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.

But the ersatz Eli Lilly tweet had other consequences: The pharmaceutical company’s stock dropped over 4.37% (although there may have been other factors, including similar market dips that day from other pharmaceutical makers). Additionally, it brought extra public attention to the issue of insulin prices — something advocacy groups and diabetics had been trying to accomplish for years. Public shaming does work, sometimes.

Morrow, who publicly revealed that he was behind the tweet two weeks after posting it, told BuzzFeed News that he is aware that the price cut was probably already in the works — but there’s a chance that the public pressure caused by his tweet sped up the decision. 

But let’s not overcomplicate it. Let’s all take the W on this one. 

“I did have an emotional reaction to this news,” Morrow said of Eli Lilly’s announcement. “I haven't really cried since the season finale of The Leftovers, but I felt some welling up, even if I don't trust Lilly's motivations here.”