Elon Musk's First Order Of Business At Twitter Is Making Blue Checks Cost $20 A Month

Elon Musk, fresh off completing his purchase of Twitter, has made one of his first orders of business making the site's infamous "Blue Checks" pay — literally.

According to a report from Platformer and The Verge, Musk's apparent first big idea to get Twitter to generate revenue is to make being verified on the platform a $20/month service. Furthermore, the team in charge of developing the subscription service has until November 7th to deliver, or they're all fired.

Twitter's verification system was implemented in 2009 after baseball manager Tony La Russa sued the company because someone was impersonating him on the platform. Since then, it's become one of the site's more notorious and contentious features.

There is an impression among some on the internet that those with verified accounts are liberals with inflated egos, and nearly any major piece of Twitter discourse will find people (often conservatives) rolling their eyes at the "blue checks" weighing in on whatever controversy is circulating on Twitter that day.

Musk's plan can be seen as a bet that the ego stroke of a blue check will be worth $20 a month to enough people to generate a lucrative revenue stream. However, as the news spread about the new plan, many Twitter users, including some verified users, laughed and expressed they'd gladly let their blue ticks go rather than pay to maintain them. They also joked that paying $20 per month for a little symbol would be very dorky.

Others noted that Musk's strict and tight deadline for the feature could be a recipe for problems. Twitter has historically only delivered new features after months, and sometimes years, of rigorous testing.

That Musk gave a development team a week to develop a subscription service or face dismissal seemed draconian to some and opened up the potential for a rushed, buggy final product.

While the new $20 price tag will almost assuredly result in a mass un-verification on Twitter, some think it will still get Twitter some money. Some have noted that even if 90 percent of currently verified accounts don't opt into the subscription service, if just 10 percent do, Twitter could rake in $7.2 million a month.