A few days after assuming control of Twitter, Elon Musk gave an ultimatum to engineers over a new project.
According to a story from The Verge, Musk intends to establish a pay-to-play verification system that will charge verified customers $20 each month.
The catch is that engineers have until November 7 to implement the plan or face termination. The project was not disclosed to employees until October 30.
According to the Verge story, the cost of the verification is subject to change. The price will also include features that have not yet been stated.
Since Musk’s initial attempt to purchase Twitter, the world’s richest man has made it obvious that he intends to overhaul the social media giant.
Musk tweeted hours before The Verge’s report was published, ‘The entire verification procedure is currently being redesigned.’
Earlier, Casey Newton of the technology website Platformer revealed that Twitter was considering charging verified users for the privilege.
DailyMail.com has requested comment from Twitter on this article.
Twitter has close to 400 thousand verified users. According to sources, bots make up five percent of all users, while ‘heavy tweeters’ make up less than ten percent of the site’s monthly users, therefore requiring them to pay could help the company stay alive.
Less engaged users equals less impressions for advertising. During the legal struggle to buy Twitter, Musk stated that fewer than 16 million users can view the vast majority of advertisements.
Musk has also rejected a New York Times report that accused him of plotting a series of layoffs prior to November 1 to avoid paying employees their yearly stock incentives.
Musk responded to ProPublica’s Eric Umansky’s tweet about the Times piece with a simple, “This is false”
Later, Musk tweeted a screenshot of a headline from NYTimes.com accusing him of sharing a link to a fabricated report about Paul Pelosi’s assault.
The headline stated, “In a Tweet, Elon Musk Shares a Link From a Website Known to Publish Fake News.”
Musk joked, “This is a hoax; I did not tweet a link to the New York Times.”
Musk previously deleted a tweet that said Paul Pelosi’s assailant was a gay prostitute he met while out drinking.
The tweet including a link to an article stating that the husband of the House Speaker left a San Francisco gay bar with David DePape prior to his assault has been removed from the new Twitter CEO’s page barely hours after being posted.
Now, he is being accused of capitulating to the communist rabble.
Musk posted the hypothesis in response to a tweet by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in which she claimed that the attack on the 82-year-old was caused by Republican “mouthpieces” spewing “hatred and insane conspiracy theories.”
The 51-year-old billionaire replied, “There’s a small chance there’s more to this tale than meets the eye,” and provided a link to a piece published by an obscure publication called the Santa Monica Observer.
According to Axios, the site appeared to have crashed when Musk first highlighted the post, with readers receiving an error page stating that the site’s webserver, Cloudflare, was “returning an unknown problem.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, the same news source earlier alleged that Hillary Clinton had died prior to the 2016 presidential election and that a body duplicate had been dispatched to debate Donald Trump. In addition, the report asserted that sunshine could treat COVID and that Kanye West had joined the Trump administration.
The most recent article, which is still accessible in an internet archive, was titled “The Horrible Truth: Paul Pelosi Was Drunk Again and in a Fight with a Male Prostitute on Friday Morning.”
According to the author Stan Greene’s “honest judgment,” Paul Pelosi and DePape met at a homosexual club earlier that evening and then traveled to the home together.
Greene provided no evidence to support his assertions, and police have not disclosed any information corroborating any of the allegations.
In August of this year, Pelosi was sentenced to five days in jail for crashing his Porsche while drunk, yet there is no evidence that he is homosexual or an alcoholic.
Musk’s decision to promote such a ridiculous hypothesis prompted outrage on Twitter just days after he purchased the site and pledged to make it a bastion of free expression.
While he wants the social media giant to become a “digital town square,” he wrote to advertisers on Thursday that it “clearly cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be spoken with no consequences.”