Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given his employees an initial ultimatum: meet his deadline to launch paid verification on Twitter, or pack their bags and go.
The directive was to swap Twitter Blue, the company's optional $4.99 per month subscription that unlocks additional feature.
Twitter currently plans to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users have 90 days to opt-in or lose their blue tick. Employees working on the project were notified on Sunday that they must meet a November 7 deadline to roll out the feature.
Musk was clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to overhaul the way Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. On Sunday, he tweeted: "The entire review process is currently being revised."
Casey Newton of the platform first reported that Twitter was considering charging a fee for verification. A Twitter spokesperson had not responded to a request for comment at press time.
Despite becoming a "main tweet" after three days, Musk quickly made changes to Twitter, starting with changing the homepage.
With the help of a Tesla engineer he hired on Twitter as a consultant, he's also planning mass layoffs aimed at middle managers and engineers who haven't been involved with the codebase in recent times. The layoffs are expected to begin this week, with managers already drawing up a list of staff to be cut. Employees tasked with running Musk's project since he took over
The Twitter Blue subscription was widely launched almost a year ago to see ad-free articles from several publishers and other changes to the app such as: B. different colored home screen icons. In the few quarters Twitter reported revenue as a publicly traded company after its debut, advertising remains the largest share of revenue. Musk aims to grow subscriptions to half of the company's total revenue.