After buying Twitter for $44 billion, trolling billionaire Elon Musk wasted no time in cleaning out the old guard and showing what could happen under his leadership. The Washington Post reported that massive layoffs may be in the works.

Musk wasted no time before indulging himself, changing his resume, first to "Chief Twit" and now to "Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator." He also began addressing reports that the authentication process would become a subscription service. Author Stephen King complained little about paying $20 for verification (you would think he could afford it) and said he would disappear "like Enron" if such a scheme were implemented

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To which Mask responded: "You have to pay the fees somehow. How about $8?"

Shortly thereafter, Mask expanded on the possible future of the platform's "blue check mark" accounts. At present, Twitter authentication is a process of proving one's identity to a company, intended to allow users to trust that a public figure's account really belongs to that public figure. Of course, what was intended as a security feature of sorts has come to have its own impact on the platform, and everyone complains about the verification process.

"Twitter's current system of lords and peasants about who does and does not have a blue check mark is bullshit," Mask wrote (opens in new tab). 'Power to the people. Blue for $8/month.

You really have to have chutzpah to rephrase a subscription service for something that is currently free as "power to the people." The total acquisition price includes $13 billion in debt, which Musk will have to pay off. The ideal way to do that would be for Twitter to pay for itself. In other words, become a profitable company that can justify the $44 billion price tag. If Twitter does not make a significant amount of money soon, Musk stands to lose a lot of money.

Musk further specified what an attractive subscription offer would look like: the $8 price would be adjusted on a country-by-country basis "in proportion to purchasing power parity," and blue checkmark accounts would also have the following: "Replies, mentions, search priority, spam/ essential to defeating scams." These accounts will also be able to "post longer videos and audio" and will also have "half the number of ads."

In other words, even if you pay, you will still see ads on Twitter, and for users who don't pay, the ads could be even worse. One of Musk's more interesting ideas, however, is bundled with this. That is that Twitter subscriptions could feature a "paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us."

In other words, any account with a blue check mark would be able to access certain pay sites without having to subscribe individually. This is definitely a problem that needs to be solved in the modern Internet. While many of us would be happy to pay for quality online content, few of us can afford to pay multiple $5 or $10 monthly subscriptions to various outlets. And given that Twitter's tentacles are tightly wrapped around the media ecosystem, Twitter is in a strong position to offer something along those lines.

Musk believes that this type of service will "drive out the bots" and that subscription fees will "raise the cost of crime on Twitter by several orders of magnitude." "Crime is a strange word in the context of Twitter, but some of Mask's own memes probably fit that description.

Anyway, change is coming to Twitter, and it is already affecting a small part of Twitter's gaming ecosystem. Mr. Musk has to make this business profitable, and he has to do it fast. And he clearly believes that a potentially large revenue stream is to make all Twitter addicts pay. For those who can't or won't do so, we'll get more advertising; for those who can't or won't do so, we'll get more advertising.