Elon Musk Owns Twitter: Now What?

Elon Musk is officially the CEO of Twitter, and not even a week in, the new "Chief Twit" has made some bold moves.

Number one.

He fired CEO Parag Agrawal and a few other executives immediately. Of course, he fired the CEO to make room for himself. But that's not the only string of firings that's to come.

It seems like Musk is trying to dissolve the company's board, laying off many veteran executives as he aims to become one of the leading directors of Twitter.


And if he isn't laying employees off, they're doing it themselves.

On Oct. 28th, Twitter's former Chief Customer Officer, Sarah Personette, said, "Hi folks, I wanted to share that I resigned on Friday from Twitter, and my work access was officially cut off last night."

No one knows for sure how many Twitter employees will be laid off. The company has around 7,500 team members, and it is possible that between 25% to 50% of Twitter's workforce may be laid off.

Musk is "cleaning house," as they say. And who knows who will replace who. Also, it's unclear how long Musk will be the CEO of Twitter. He said it's "just temporary."

The guy already runs Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink, so his hands are definitely full.

He could just be playing this role to mold Twitter into how he envisions it to be.

Musk has plans to form a "moderation council" before it reinstates banned accounts, which will have a group of members with "widely diverse viewpoints."

But regardless of this content moderation council that doesn't exist yet, Musk vows to make substantial changes to Twitter's content policing policies.

He wants to relax the rules a bit and limit perma-bans, but he's promised advertisers that Twitter won't be a "free-for-all hellscape" where ads appear alongside horrific posts.

I guess that's good, right (maybe)?

Well, here's some actual news that may be good for Twitter after all. Now, when you visit Twitter.com, it takes you to the Explore page to show you Tweets instead of forcing you to sign-up first.

Musk has plans to bring back Vine… remember that?

TikTok's precursor, Vine, for those of you younger than 20, was a short-form video app where users uploaded clips that lasted 6 seconds. Musk wants to revive that app to compete with TikTok.

Attention spans are getting shorter these days, but not Vine short.

Last but not least, Musk is considering making verifications a "Twitter Blue" perk and aims to launch a subscription plan of $5 to $20 a month for verified users.

Yup, he wants to charge verified users a monthly price and has told Twitter employees they have until Nov. 7th to make it happen, or they'll be fired.

Celebrities, politicians, journalists, influencers, etc., must sign up within 90 days, or they'll lose that coveted blue checkmark.

There are 428,000 verified accounts out of the 206 million active daily users.

Some verified users said they wouldn't pay the $20 a month and that charging for the blue checkmark would actually increase spam issues, something Musk advocated against since it's a way to tell who's a real person on Twitter.

On the flip side, people sometimes get verified randomly while others try to apply to get that blue checkmark yet still get denied. Musk wants to put that verification mark and bundle the other perks you get with Twitter Blue behind a paywall at $20 a month.

UPDATE: As of Nov. 2nd, 2022, Musk plans to charge $8 a month for verification instead of $20.

Charging money to get all the perks of a premium version of Twitter may make sense to some, while to others, it doesn't. But who knows how Musk will take the social media platform forward in the future. We'll have to keep you posted until next time.

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