Musk floats paid Twitter verification and fires board

Billionaire Elon Musk is already making big changes for Twitter — and as he begins his first week as the social media platform owner, he faces a major hurdle.

Twitter’s new owner fired the company’s board and made himself the sole member, according to the company’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

He’s also testing the waters by asking users to pay for verification. A venture capitalist working with Musk tweeted a poll asking how much users would be willing to pay for a blue checkmark, which Twitter has historically used to verify higher-profile accounts so other users know about it. Indeed they are.

Mr Musk, whose account has been verified, replied: “Interesting.”

Critics have derided the logo, which is usually awarded to celebrities, politicians, business leaders and journalists, as a symbol of elite status.

But Twitter also uses blue checkmarks to authenticate activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as lesser-known journalists in small publications around the world, as an additional tool to curb misinformation from accounts impersonating others.

“The whole verification process is improving now,” Musk tweeted on Sunday in response to a user seeking help with verification.

Meanwhile, billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said on Friday he and his kingdom holding company had a combined $1.89bn (£1.65bn) stake in Twitter’s existing stake, making it a successor The company’s largest shareholder after Musk.

The news raised concerns among some lawmakers, including Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut.

Mr. Murphy tweeted that he asked the Committee on Foreign Investment, which reviews acquisitions of U.S. businesses by foreign buyers, to investigate the national security implications of Saudi investment tweets.

“We should be concerned that the Saudis, who have a clear interest in suppressing political speech and influencing U.S. politics, are now the second largest owner of a major social media platform,” Mr Murphy tweeted. “There is a clear national security concern that should be reviewed by CFIUS.”

Mr. Musk, who owns the social media service, has enlisted a group of friends and investors in the tech world to help guide the San Francisco-based company’s transformation, which could include a restructuring of its workforce.

Musk fired CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives last week. There has been uncertainty about whether and when he will begin the mass layoffs.

Those who revealed they were helping Musk included Sriram Krishnan, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which in the spring pledged to fund Musk’s plan to buy the company and take it private.

Mr. Krishnan, also a former Twitter product chief, said in a tweet that it was “a very important company that can make a huge difference in the world, and Elon is the one to make it happen”.

Venture capitalist Jason Calacanis, who tweeted a poll on whether users would pay for verification, said over the weekend that he was “poking around on Twitter a bit, just trying to help as much as possible during the transition.”

Mr Calacanis said the team had “developed a very comprehensive plan to reduce the number (and visibility) of bots, spammers and bad actors on the platform”.

In a Twitter poll, he asked users if they would pay $5 to $15 a month to “be verified and get a blue checkmark” on Twitter.

Twitter is currently free to most users because its revenue depends on advertising.

Mr Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44bn (£38bn) in April, but he didn’t finalise the deal until Thursday night as his attempt to back out of the deal led to a protracted legal battle with the company.

Musk’s lawyers are now asking the Delaware Chancery Court to drop the case, according to a court filing made public Monday.

If the two sides didn’t close the deal by the end of last week, they should have gone to trial in November.

Musk has made multiple statements about how to fix Twitter since the start of the year, and it’s unclear which proposals he will prioritize.

He has pledged to cut some of Twitter’s content restrictions to promote free speech, but said on Friday that no major decisions would be made on content or reinstating banned accounts until a “content moderation committee” with disparate views was formed.

He later qualified the sentence, tweeting that “anyone suspended for minor and suspicious reasons will be released from Twitter jail”.

The head of a cryptocurrency exchange that invested $500 million (£436 million) in Musk’s takeover of Twitter said he had many reasons to back the deal, including Musk’s potential to turn Twitter into a cryptocurrency-backed company , and the well-known concept Web3, which many cryptocurrency enthusiasts see as the next generation of the internet.

“We want to make sure that crypto has a place in free speech,” Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao told CNBC on Monday.

“There’s more tactical stuff, like we want to help Twitter bring it to Web3 when it’s ready.”

He said cryptocurrencies could help address some of Musk’s immediate challenges, such as plans to charge more users for premium memberships.

“This can be done very easily on a global scale by using cryptocurrencies as a means of payment,” he said.