After over half a year of ups and downs, twists and turns, Elon Musk is now officially the owner of microblogging platform Twitter. And it looks like the roller coaster ride is not stopping there either. Following a wipe of the company’s top execs, Musk now wants another change to the bird platform. Which involves a price hike for its subscription tier.
As The Verge reports, Elon Musk wants Twitter Blue, said optional subscription tier, to be up to four times more expensive. This would mean hiking the current US$2.99 (~RM14) price to US$19.99 (~RM95). Justifying the price hike is the granting of the verification blue check mark for those who pay up. On the flip side, when this goes into effect, those who already have their accounts verified will have their verification removed if they don’t subscribe within 90 days.
Things take a grim turn for employees of Twitter too, as the report claims that they were given until 7 November to make the change. Failure to do so would reportedly seem them losing their job at the bird platform. Which sounds pretty extreme, but still sort of in line with Musk’s planned aggressive downsizing. The report also notes that he plans to lay off middle managers and engineers who “haven’t recently contributed o the code base”.
Elon Musk previously said that he intends to make drastic changes to Twitter, from relaxing moderation rules and eliminating spam bots. This move of hiking prices of the Twitter Blue subscription may contribute to the latter, somewhat. But at the same time, Musk has also said some pretty contradicting things, like the acquisition being “not a way to make money”, while also telling advertisers that he wants the bird platform to be the “most respected advertising platform in the world”.
(Source: The Verge)
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