Twitter, led by Elon Musk, is planning big layoffs and a $20 monthly fee for any user who wants to be verified or keep their current account verified.
According to The Verge, Musk ordered employees to raise the price of the Twitter Blue subscription from $4.99 per month to $19.99 and to require anyone with a verified account to subscribe in order to retain its blue check mark. Citing “people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence,” The Verge article says the plan is that “verified users would have 90 days to subscribe [to Twitter Blue] or lose their blue tick. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they had to meet the November 7 deadline to launch the feature or they would be fired.”
Turning verification into a paid feature could make it easier for scammers to impersonate real people. Like Twitter website note, “The blue Verified badge on Twitter lets people know that a public interest account is genuine. To receive the blue badge, your account must be genuine, notable, and active.”
Businesses might consider fees part of the cost of doing business, but individuals are less likely to pay so much just to keep their blue checks. When a verified person loses their check mark, a scammer could pretend to be that person and there would be no verified account to point to to prove the scammer is a fake.
Musk tweeted Sunday that “the whole verification process is being overhauled right now,” but didn’t give details. We reached out to Twitter’s PR department today and will update this article if we get more information about Twitter Blue and verification plans.
An earlier report on plans to tie verification to Twitter Blue said the subscription price would remain at $4.99 per month. “Twitter is strongly considering charging its users to stay verified on the service, Platformer has learned,” the report from Casey Newton’s Platformer news site said. “If the project [moves] going forward, users would have to subscribe to Twitter Blue for $4.99 per month or lose their badges.”
Twitter Blue currently provides access to the Untweet option and several other features.
Layoffs could affect nearly 50% of staff
While Musk reportedly told Twitter staff that it was not true that he planned to cut 75% of the workforce, multiple reports indicate he is drawing up plans for big layoffs. Over the weekend, “Elon Musk’s inner circle huddled with Twitter’s remaining senior executives”, and the group was “deciding what should be an initial round of layoffs, which will target around a quarter of the staff totaling more than 7,000,” The Washington Post reported.
The Post’s report says the layoffs will affect “nearly every department and are expected to have a specific impact on sales, product, engineering, legal, trust and safety in the coming days… After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest-paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,000, according to documents seen by The Post.”
One of the Post’s sources “said the total number of layoffs would likely be closer to 50 percent.” The newspaper previously reported that “Musk told potential investors in his agreement to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75%” of staff.
A New York Times report, citing people familiar with the matter. Musk said “ordered the cuts across the company, with some teams to be cut more than others.” Bloomberg also cited unnamed sources in a report that Musk “has asked managers to compile lists of team members who could be fired.”
Musk refuse part of the New York Times report which stated that “the layoffs at Twitter would take place before the November 1 date when employees were due to receive stock awards as part of their compensation.”
Musk’s cost-cutting may be at least partly related to the $13 billion in debt he used to complete the $44 billion purchase. “Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was approximately $50 million,” said a New York Times report on Twitter’s finances. “With the new debt incurred as part of the deal, that will now climb to around $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated around $630 million in cash flow for meet its financial obligations.
Musk fired CEO Parag Agrawal and several other top executives just after completing the acquisition on Thursday last week. He would have named himself CEO but is being called the “Chief Tweet”.
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