Tech billionaire Elon Musik has been the head of the social media platform since Friday, October 28 Twitter. He had paid $44 billion for the acquisition. Now he wants to radically restructure the short message service and, apparently, as quickly as possible.
Both employees and users (especially those with many followers) will be affected by the announced restructuring. At the moment, however, it is mainly the employees who are preparing for large waves of layoffs and who have to make changes to the website in the shortest possible time.
Already in the spring of this year, Elon Musk started polls on Twitter that reveal what else he could be planning in the future. You can find out more about this in our article:
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Layoffs at Twitter – more than half should go
As reported by the New York Times, citing informed sources, Musk is said to want to lay off half of the entire Twitter workforce. Accordingly, it is reported that Musk has commissioned managers to draw up lists of who should be fired.
They are said to have had until November 1st to do this, otherwise stock options would have to be paid out. A person close to Musk reportedly said the following, according to the New York Times:
I was told that about 50 percent of the employees should be laid off.
In addition, Musk is said to have given a development team a deadline of one week to implement a new feature. If they didn’t comply, they would allegedly be fired. According to the Washington Post he has already fired the top executives of Twitter.
Subscription model for blue ticks
Users with larger Twitter accounts will have to pay for the coveted blue ticks in the future – this is also part of Musk’s new announcements. The blue tick is a kind of seal of approval from Twitter, which confirms the identity of the person behind the profile. This applies above all to people in public life.
According to this, the “Twitter Blue” subscription model should become mandatory for all users who want to have a blue tick on their profile name. The price will reportedly increase from $4.99 to $19.99, how Platformer reported.
Users who have not subscribed to Twitter Blue within 90 days of the revision will lose their verification – i.e. the blue tick.
Along with the above changes, Musk wants also set up a committee, which will decide controversial content on the platform in the future. This step is particularly controversial. Most recently, Musk himself shared a purely speculative conspiracy theory about the attack by Paul Pelosi, the husband of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (via daily News). The tweet has since been deleted.