Musk’s reason behind scrapping blue ticks unless paid for is all “about treating everyone equally,”he tweeted to William Shatner on Sunday. “There shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities imo.” 

The irony is that despite his egalitarian approach to social media, Twitter accounts owned by celebrities may be getting preferential treatment, according to a Platformer report published Monday.

According to documents obtained by Platformer, Twitter maintains and monitors a list of “around 35 VIP users.” This list, per the report, offers increased visibility on the platform and includes journalists, celebrities, and Musk himself. LeBron James, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, President Joe Biden, YouTube personality MrBeast, and journalists Matt Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald, Noah Smith, and Adrian Wojnarowski were among the names listed.

The further irony is that Musk created this tab for himself after expressing concern that Twitter’s ranking systems could be suppressing his posts, something he noticed in December when his own account’s engagement began to drop, and was a way to monitor engagement received by Twitter “power users,” per the report.

If tweets from the selected accounts began to drop, according to Platformer, engineers could tweak the code so that falling tweets were always visible. Still, Musk wasn’t satisfied. The engineering team reportedly introduced an update in February that boosted Musk’s tweets over other users on the platform, and allowed VIPs to bypass visibility limitations on the “For You” recommendations tab.

At this point the irony is no shock nor surprise following a sixth month tenure of messy messages from Twitter under Musk.