Just a few days after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to engineers regarding a new project.
According to a report from The Verge, Musk wants to launch a pay-to-play verification system where verified users will pay $20 per month.
The key is that the engineers have until November 7 to get the scheme up and running or they will be fired. Employees were informed about the project only on October 30.
The Verge report says that the cost of the verification is subject to change. The price will also cover other as yet unspecified features.
Ever since Musk first proposed buying Twitter, the world’s richest man has made it clear that he plans to turn things around at the social media giant.
Hours before The Verge’s report appeared, Musk tweeted, “The entire vetting process is currently being upgraded.”
Musk spoke to Twitter employees on his first day as the new boss on October 26
Casey Newton of tech website Platformer previously reported that Twitter was leaning toward asking verified users to pay for the privilege.
DailyMail.com has asked Twitter for comment on the story.
Twitter has about 400,000 verified users. Making them pay could help the platform stay afloat after reports that bots make up five percent of all users and “heavy tweeters” make up less than 10 percent of the site’s monthly users.
Less active users means less attention for advertisers. During the legal battle to acquire Twitter, Musk himself argued that fewer than 16 million users could see the vast majority of ads.
Musk also denied a New York Times article that accused the Tesla founder of planning a series of layoffs before Nov. 1 to avoid paying employees annual stock grants.
In response to ProPublica’s Eric Umansky’s tweet about the Times, Musk simply wrote, “This is false.”
Musk later took aim at the newspaper of record, posting a screenshot of a headline from NYTimes.com that accused it of posting a link to a fake story about an attack on Paul Pelosi.
The headline read: “Elon Musk shares link from site known to publish fake news on Twitter.”
Musk quipped, “That’s fake — I *didn’t* link to the New York Times.”
In response to ProPublica’s Eric Umansky’s tweet about the Times, Musk simply wrote, “This is false.”
Musk has previously hinted that he views the New York Times as a fake news outlet.
Earlier, Musk deleted a tweet that claimed that Paul Pelosi’s attacker was a gay prostitute he met during a drunken night out.
A Twitter link to an article suggesting the House Speaker’s husband left a San Francisco gay bar with David DePaipe before he attacked no longer appears on Twitter’s new CEO’s page — just a few hours after it was posted.
Now he was accused of “giving in to the left-wing crowd.”
Musk published the theory in response to a tweet by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in which she claimed that Republican “mouthpieces” spreading “hate and crazy conspiracy theories” were responsible for the attack on the 82-year-old man.
“There is a small possibility that there may be more to this story than meets the eye,” the 51-year-old billionaire replied, sharing a link to a story published by an obscure publication called the Santa Monica Observer.
It appeared to be down since Musk first broke the story, and future readers received an error page that said the site’s web server, Cloudflare, “returned an unknown error,” according to Axios.
New Twitter CEO Elon Musk shared a link to a now-deleted article that suggested Paul Pelosi left a gay bar with David DePape early Friday morning before he was allegedly attacked with a hammer.
Musk shared a now-deleted Santa Monica Observer article written by Stan Green
Paul Pelosi (right) was able to call 911 to alert authorities to the situation as it unfolded. He is pictured here with his wife, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in 2019
According to the Los Angeles Times, the same publication previously reported that Hillary Clinton died before the 2016 election and that a doppelganger was sent to the debate with Donald Trump. It also claimed that sunlight can cure COVID and that Kanye West was appointed to the Trump administration.
The latest story, which can still be accessed on the Internet Archive, was headlined: “Horrible truth: Paul Pelosi was drunk again and got into an argument with a prostitute early Friday morning.”
Writer Stan Green claimed it was “in his honest opinion” that Paul Pelosi and DePape met at a gay bar earlier that night and went home together.
Green has not provided any evidence to support his claims, and police have not shared any information to support any of the claims made.
Pelosi was previously sentenced to five days in jail in August after drunkenly crashing his Porsche earlier this year, but there is no suggestion that he is gay or an alcoholic.
Musk’s decision to share such an outlandish theory sparked fury on Twitter just days after he bought the site and vowed to make it a model of free speech.
He wrote in a note to The Advertiser on Thursday that while he wants the social media giant to become a “digital town square,” it “clearly cannot become a free-for-all hell where you can say whatever you want without consequence.”
