Verified Twitter Users Sound Off On Elon Musk’s Verification Charge

As Twitter CEO, Elon Musk is giving his employees an ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe to the higher charge or lose their blue verified checkmark. Additionally, employees who are working on the project were told on Sunday (October 30) that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

Leading up to his acquisition of the social site, Musk has been clear that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. On Sunday (October 30), he tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now” in a response to one user asking about help with verification.

So far, “Chief Twit” Musk has fired at least four top Twitter executives as his first order of business (CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, and safety, Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett). He has brought in Tesla engineers as advisors and is planning mass layoffs aimed at middle managers and engineers who haven’t recently contributed to the code base. Those cuts are expected to begin this week with managers creating lists of employees to cut.

The Twitter Blue subscription was launched about a year ago as a way to view ad-free articles from some publishers and make other tweaks to the app, such as a different color home screen icon. Advertising remained the vast majority of its revenue and with this plan, Musk seems keen on growing subscriptions to become half of the company’s overall revenue.

Jason Calacanis (one of Musk's top advisors) ran a poll on Twitter Monday asking, "How much would you pay to be verified & get a blue check mark on Twitter?" A majority of the results (81.4% as of Monday) opted that they would not pay to be verified on the social site.

Musk replied to the poll, "Interesting."

See what other verified users had to say below: