Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that has been losing money, had an idea to turn his company's fortunes around: "I'll charge businesses $1,000 a month to keep their verified status!" he thought. "Just imagine how much money I could make!" It was his best idea since the Cybertruck. But when businesses were told they had to pay Musk to remain verified on Twitter, they balked. The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times had no intention of paying Musk, and even Catturd, a right-wing troll who held Musk in a Rasputin-like thrall, complained about the verification payments.
Musk realized that insisting on moving forward with his money-making scheme would lead Twitter further in the direction of becoming a platform for harassers and Nazis. Although this certainly appealed to the genius inventor, he also owed billions of dollars to his investors, and as they say, "money talks."
With great reluctance, Musk announced that the 10,000 most followed accounts on Twitter would be exempt from the fee.
From Variety:
Twitter will waive the $1,000 monthly fee for its 500 largest advertising clients and for the 10,000 most-followed brands, companies and organizations that have been previously verified, the New York Times reported, citing an internal Twitter document.
The most-followed companies, brands and organizations on Twitter include @Twitter itself, as well as YouTube, NASA, CNN, ESPN, the New York Times, the NBA and the BBC's breaking news account.
A request for comment sent to Twitter's PR account returned an automated reply with a poop emoji (a change Musk announced last week).
