LOOKING FOR MONEY
The purchase of Twitter, financed with a mix of loans and capital commitments, including from Musk’s own wealth, has saddled the company with approximately $1 billion in annual interest payments.
Since Musk took the reins, he has implemented various forms of monetization: laying off 80% of his workforce, auctioning off his office furniture, and recently announcing that he would limit access to his application programming interface (API) – software tools that they allow outside researchers and developers to collect and analyze data – and they will charge a fee in most cases.
The most notorious measure were the changes in Twitter Bluea subscription that already existed before the incorporation of Musk, but that under the leadership of the businessman became paid, when before Twitter gave it free to personalities and organizations.
For what counts as that of the singer Beyoncé, that of the first lady of the United States, Jill Biden, or that of the businessman Bill Gates, now they look the same as that of any other user.
The New York Times was one of the first outlets to announce that it would not even pay the $8 to give its employees the blue mark. nor the 1,000 to obtain the yellow verification for the official account of the mediumsomething that did not sit well with Musk, who then described the content of the newspaper account as “diarrhea”.
Only 0.2% of Twitter users pay for Twitter Blue, and according to Similarweb, Twitter Blue had around 116,000 confirmed subscriptions across the web in March, up 138% from the previous month.
The advantages provided by a Twitter Blue account are that users can write longer content, post longer videos, edit their tweets and have more visibility in the social network algorithm.