Elon Musk Wants to Charge Users $20/Month For Twitter’s Verified Badge

Following his acquisition of Twitter last week, Elon Musk isn’t wasting time to explore new revenue streams for the platform. According to a report from Platformer, Elon Musk wants to make Twitter’s Verified badge a paid feature, and he’s given employees working on the project until November 7 to make this Verified badge a Twitter Blue perk,

“The whole verification process is being revamped right now.” Musk tweeted yesterday. After Musk fired Twitter top executives as soon as he took over the company, the report says that Twitter employees will lose their jobs if they can’t meet the November 7 deadline Musk gave them.

If verification does become a Twitter Blue perk, Musk reportedly wants to raise its price from $4.99/month to $19.99. Moreover, Twitter users who already have a verified badge would have 90 days to subscribe to Twitter Blue if they want to keep the checkmark on their profile.

This plan does raise a lot of questions as Twitter Blue is currently only available in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. As of today, the subscription includes some nice-to-have features such as undoing a tweet before it goes public, or editing tweets for a limited time. Twitter Blue launched a year ago and its rollout to more countries has been slow, to say the least.

Making the verification badge a Twitter Blue perk would certainly make the subscription more valuable. However, it’s not clear if many users would be ready to pay $19.99/month to be verified. Over the years, a lot of Twitter users have been complaining about the verification process being a black box, but Musk’s solution is certainly going to raise a lot of eyebrows.