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Just days after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has issued an ultimatum to engineers over a new project.
According to a new report from The Verge, Musk wants to launch a pay-for-play verification system in which verified users are charged $20 per month.
The kicker is that engineers have until November 7 to launch the scheme or face being fired. Employees were only told of the project on October 30.
The Verge report says that the price of the verification is subject to change. The price will also cover so-far unspecified other features.
Since Musk first offered to buy Twitter, the world’s wealthiest man has made it clear of his plans to shake things up at the social media giant.
Hours before The Verge report emerged, Musk tweeted: ‘The whole verification process is being revamped right now.’
Musk spoke to Twitter employees on his first day as the new boss on October 26
Earlier, Platformer’s Casey Newton reported that Twitter was leaning towards asking for verified users to pay for the privilege.
DailyMail.com has reached out to Twitter for comment on this story.
There are close to 400,000 verified users on Twitter. Making them pay could help the platform stay afloat after reports that bots make up five percent of all users and ‘heavy tweeters’ make up less than 10 percent of the site’s monthly users.
Less active users mean less eyeballs for advertisers. During the court battle to acquire Twitter, Musk himself claimed that fewer than 16 million users are able to see the vast majority of ads.
Musk has also refuted a New York Times story accusing the Tesla-founder of planning a series of layoffs before November 1, in order to avoid paying staff their annual stock grants.
In responding to ProPublica’s Eric Umansky tweeting the Times story, Musk simply wrote: ‘This is false.’
Later, Musk took further aim at the newspaper of record in tweeting a screenshot of a headline from NYTimes.com accusing him of posting a link to fake story surrounding the assault on Paul Pelosi.
The headline read: ‘Elon Musk, in a Tweet, Shares Link From Site Known to Publish Fake News.’
Musk quipped: ‘This is fake – I did *not* tweet out a link to the New York Times.’
In responding to ProPublica’s Eric Umansky tweeting the Times story, Musk simply wrote: ‘This is false’
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Earlier, Musk insinuated that he regarded the New York Times as a fake news outlet
Musk earlier deleted a tweet suggesting Paul Pelosi’s attacker was a gay prostitute he met during a boozy night out.
The tweet shared a link to an article suggesting the House Speaker’s husband left a San Francisco gay bar with David DePape prior to his assault no longer appears on the new Twitter CEO’s page — just hours after it was posted.
He has now been accused of ‘caving into the leftist mob.’
Musk had posted the theory 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 the fault of Republican ‘mouthpieces’ spreading ‘hate and deranged conspiracy theories.’
‘There’s a tiny possibility there may be more to this story than meets the eye,’ the 51-year-old billionaire responded, sharing a link to a story published by an obscure outlet called the Santa Monica Observer.
It seemed to have crashed since the story was first highlighted by Musk, with would-be readers receiving an error page reading that the site’s webserver, Cloudflare, was ‘returning an unknown error’ according to Axios.
New Twitter CEO Elon Musk shared a link to a now-deleted article suggesting Paul Pelosi left a gay bar with David DePape early Friday morning before he was allegedly attacked with a hammer
Musk shared a now-deleted Santa Monica Observer article written by Stan Greene
Paul Pelosi, right, was able to call 911 alerting authorities to the situation as it was unfolding. He is pictured here with his wife, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in 2019
According to the Los Angeles Times, the same outlet previously reported that Hillary Clinton died before the 2016 election, and that a body double had been sent to debate Donald Trump. It also claimed that sunlight could treat COVID, and that Kanye West had been appointed to the Trump administration.
The latest story, which can still be accessed in an online archive, was headlined: ‘The Awful Truth: Paul Pelosi Was Drunk Again, And In a Dispute With a Male Prostitute Early Friday Morning.’
Author Stan Greene claimed ‘in his honest opinion’ that Paul Pelosi and DePape met at a gay bar earlier that night and went to the home together.
Greene offered no evidence to back up his claims, and police have not shared any information which confirms any of the claims made.
Pelosi was previously sentenced to five days in jail in August after he crashed his Porsche while drunk this year, but there’s no suggestion that he’s gay or an alcoholic.
Musk’s decision to share such an outlandish theory sparked fury on Twitter, just days after he bought the site and vowed to make it a paragon of free speech.
He had written in a message to advertisers on Thursday that while he wants the social media giant to become a ‘digital town square’ it ‘obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.’
