Twitter is rumoured to be considering charging 20 Dollars per month for verification!

Elon Musk has issued his first injunction to employees: satisfy his deadline for introducing paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

Musk stated repeatedly in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to change the way Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. He tweeted on Sunday, “The entire verification process is being revamped right now.”

Casey Newton of Platformer was the first to report that Twitter was considering charging for verification. A Twitter spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by press time

Musk has acted rapidly to make changes at Twitter, modifying the homepage for logged-out users just three days after becoming “Chief Twit.” He’s contemplating mass layoffs of middle management and engineers who haven’t recently added to the code base with the assistance of Tesla engineers he’s hired into Twitter as consultants. Managers have already started compiling names of staff members to lay off, and the cuts are anticipated to start this week. Since Musk took leadership on Thursday evening, those assigned to carry out his ideas have worked over the weekend and into the wee hours.

The Twitter Blue membership became publicly available over a year ago as a way to read articles from some publishers without ads and make other changes to the app, such changing the color of the app’s icon on the home screen. Advertising continued to make up the vast bulk of Twitter’s revenue in the few quarters after that launch that it declared results as a publicly traded company. Musk wants subscriptions to increase to account for half of the business’s total income.

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