Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter, has given his team his first ultimatum: either meet his goal to provide paid verification on Twitter by the end of the day or leave.
People with knowledge of the matter and an internal email seen by The Verge claim that the directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s $4.99 per month optional subscription that unlocks extra features, into a more expensive subscription that also validates users. According to Twitter, the current price of the new Twitter Blue subscription is $19.99. To maintain their blue checkmark, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe under the current policy.
The team members were informed on Sunday that failure to launch the feature by November 7 would result in termination. Musk made it clear in the months before his acquisition that he intended to alter the way Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. On Sunday, he tweeted that “the whole verification process is currently being redone.” Casey Newton of Platformer provided the first indication that Twitter was considering charging for verification. An inquiry for a response from a Twitter spokeswoman was unanswered as of the time of publication.
Within three days of taking over as “Chief Twit,” Musk acted quickly to make changes at Twitter, changing the homepage for users who are not logged in. With the help of Tesla engineers, he’s hired into Twitter as a consultant, he’s thinking about mass layoffs of middle management and programmers who haven’t lately added to the code base. Employee layoffs are expected to begin this week, and managers have already begun collecting names of those who will be let go. Those tasked with putting Musk’s plans into action have toiled through the weekend and into the small hours since Musk took the helm on Thursday evening.
More than a year ago, Twitter Blue memberships were made available to the general public as a way to view content from some publishers without advertisements and access other features like customizing the app’s icon color on the home screen. In the few quarters following that launch when Twitter disclosed results as a publicly traded company, advertising remained the great majority of its revenue. Musk wants subscriptions to rise to make up half of the company’s overall revenue.
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