Elon Musk Fights Stephen King On Price Of Blue Check Mark Verification In Rocky Start To Twitter Reign

Elon Musk, who closed his deal to purchase Twitter for roughly $44 billion last week, is beginning to prepare some bizarre strategies to recoup the cost.

So far, there have been leaks of a universally-panned potential feature to make verified accounts pay $8 a month to stay that way and reports also claim that he is trying to get Twitter engineers to revive the video platform Vine.

Musk’s subscription plan would be an overhaul of Twitter Blue, an existing optional feature that charged only $5 a month for some additional features. The switch to a focus on subscribers is a slightly strange one to do for Twitter, which has traditionally made most of its money from ad revenue. Verified users will reportedly have 90 days from the launch of the feature to pay up or lose their Verified status.

One of the first price points first discussed to keep Verification was $20 a month, but that may have shifted due to public outcry over that pretty absurd figure. Musk said yesterday that they would charge $8.

While some Musk fans may try to contend that his moves are all intensely calculated, this interaction with the acclaimed horror writer Stephen King really makes it seem like Musk is just throwing ideas out at the wall. King responded with a definite “F––k that” in response to the idea that he’d cough up money to keep his blue check, and it wasn’t long before Musk was in his replies trying to defend himself.

In a truly bizarre attempt to walk back, Musk wrote, “Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” Musk is hardly ever funny on purpose, but hearing him try to debate with Stephen King on the price of a useless subscription like he’s in a market stall haggling with vendors is pretty hilarious.

He replied to King one more time where he also wrote that his idea “is the only way to defeat the bots and trolls.” This is a strange justification because with what we know about this feature, it will only be helpful to bots and trolls.

The Verified system is a strange target for monetization since it is primarily a safety feature that helps to combat disinformation and deter random users from impersonating prominent accounts. It does little more than increase the chance that a troll can impersonate a prominent journalist or celebrity and spread misinformation, and having to combat these more-frequent situations could even unbalance the profit from the subscriptions.

Musk has since written another thread as of November 1 where he threw out other benefits of this subscription, now at the price point which he proposed to King of $8 a month. Along with apparently giving subscribers “Priority in replies, mentions & search,” it seems like any account with that amount budgeted will be able to become verified what with Musk writing, “Power to the people!”

As for the Vine situation, it has been reported that Musk was seeking to revitalize the service after getting a positive reception to it on a Twitter poll. Vine was shuttered in 2016 after Twitter bought it about four years prior. It remains to be seen whether it will retain all its original features, like the short six-second max video length, or if Musk will demand changes as well.