With Twitter now in his hands, Elon Musk has given his employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline for paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.
The company plans to make Twitter Blue, a $4.99 per month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users. Twitter intends to charge .99 for its new Twitter Blue subscription service. The current plan gives verified users 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark. On Sunday, employees working on the project were told they would be fired if they didn’t launch the feature by November 7th.
In the months following his acquisition, Musk clarified that he wanted to revamp Twitter’s verification processes and bot handling. On Sunday, he tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.”
While Musk has only been “Chief Twit” for three days, he has moved quickly to make changes at Twitter, first by changing the homepage for logged-out users. Using Tesla engineers he brought on board as advisors. He plans to lay off middle managers and engineers who last contributed to the code base a while ago. Managers have already started preparing lists of employees to be cut this week. The employees tasked with executing Musk’s projects have worked into the night and all weekend since he took control Thursday evening.
Twitter Blue was launched almost a year ago as a way to view ad-free articles from some publishers and make other tweaks to the app, including a different home screen icon colour. Following its debut as a public company, Twitter reported earnings mostly from advertising in its first few quarters. Musk’s goal is to make subscriptions half of the company’s revenue.
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