The Guy Behind The Qwikster Twitter Account Realizes What He Has, Wants A Mountain Of Cash

Greg Kumparak

Greg Kumparak is the Mobile Editor at Techcrunch. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born just outside of San Jose, and now lives in the East Bay of California. → Learn More

Monday, September 19th, 2011
elmlol

Last night, Jason went to bed a normal man, with a normal Twitter account (albeit one with a weed-smoking Elmo as the avatar), and a few dozen followers.

This morning, Jason woke up to an inbox full of messages, thousands of new followers, and wants to sell his account for many thousands of dollars.

As we chronicled last night, Netflix made a rather fundamental mistake in launching their new spin-off brand, Qwikster: they didn’t make sure they had the name locked down on all of the big social networks before making the announcement. As Jason’s luck had it, he had long owned the @Qwikster handle. He’s willing to part with it — he just wants to make sure he’ll “be making bank” first.

After over a month of silence, Jason’s @Qwikster account sprang back to life just a few hours ago and, likely to Netflix’s horror, has been more active today than it ever was before. Jason keeps touching on the idea of selling the account between poetic bursts like “I’m about to go play soccer n I got stug by a fucken bee” and “I just got scared I went into the shower turned on the water n then stuff started falling I was lik omg wtf lol”:

Jason seems to have rallied the, erm, expert counsel of his friend Gabriel (@SoccerIsLifegc7) who says they’re “not talkin til the offers get in 6 figures”.

Someone should probably tell Jason that selling Twitter handles is strictly against Twitter’s Terms Of Service, and attempts to do so can quickly result in the banhammer being dropped. Then Qwikster gets their name, free of charge.


Company: Netflix
Website: netflix.com
Launch Date: 1997
IPO: NASDAQ:NFLX

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