20 euros a month? This is how expensive Twitter could get under Elon Musk

Elon Musk is now the head of Twitter – and is currently making it clear to users and employees of the platform that he is enforcing a hands-on management style and cutting costs first. The top management around ex-CEO Parag Agrawal were just the first employees to be fired, and dozens of employees were laid off over the weekend, including many programmers.

According to their tweets after the termination, Musk is solely concerned with who has delivered more program code in the past few weeks. According to reports from inside the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, Musk is supported by Tesla managers whom he trusts and who implement his wishes on Twitter without resistance.

In addition, Musk is already implementing changes in the Twitter app and on the Twitter homepage without much hesitation. For example, he quickly changed the start page for users who were not logged in to convince them to stay - such a decision had been discussed internally for weeks before he took office, Musk simply enforced it with an order to the management.

Above all, Musk is currently planning various measures to generate more sales, and his first idea is aimed directly at the most important users of the platform: celebrities, politicians, influencers, but also experts and journalists have so-called verified user accounts on Twitter, those with a blue hooks are marked. So far, Twitter has always left a little in the dark about who exactly is verified and who isn't, and there was no formal procedure for this.

Musk now wants to monetize the status symbol “blue tick” and, according to headquarters sources, is considering introducing a monthly verification fee. A corresponding subscription should cost at least five dollars, possibly up to twenty dollars. Musk instructed the programmers on Twitter directly to introduce the payment function as soon as possible. He wants to receive working program code for it by November 7 at the latest, otherwise those responsible would be fired.

Anyone who does not agree to the subscription fee for verification should lose their blue tick within the next three months. This could be an effective means of pressure: Commercial influencers in particular, but also politicians or celebrities with large numbers of followers should be willing to pay more than $20 for the status symbol.

However, it is doubtful whether ordinary users are willing to invest the equivalent of a Netflix subscription. There are currently over 400,000 verified users on Twitter. Musk shouldn't expect a lot of sales from the ad hoc measure anyway.

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