'Blue tick' on Elon Musk's Twitter will now come at a cost

The Twitter users are not the only ones taken aback by this rather unpleasant surprise -- the employees working on the project too, have been warned that they may get fired if they don't incorporate the said feature by November 7, the reports said.

Washington (US): Among the many changes that the now 'Chief Twit' Elon Musk is hastening to incorporate in Twitter, is putting a price tag on the 'verified' status on the microblogging platform. Without revealing much about his intentions on the same, Musk tweeted "Whole verification process is being revamped right now."

However, a few US-based media platforms have revealed that Musk is planning to charge users USD 19.99 -- which amounts to over Rs 1600 -- for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Though this subscription will provide advantages through features like edit and undo tweets, the cost has taken many netizens by surprise. As per the current plan, the verified users have been given 90 days to subscribe to the app or they may lose their blue checkmark.

The users, meanwhile, are not the only ones taken aback by this rather unpleasant surprise -- the employees working on the project too, have been warned that they may get fired if they don't incorporate the said feature by November 7, the reports said. The Twitter Blue subscription feature was launched about a year ago in an attempt to make the platform an ad-free experience, other than adding some tweaks like a variety in the home screen icon color and such.

The billionaire took over Twitter recently after a series of dramatic events that went on across the entire deal that was proposed by Musk and accepted by Twitter in April this year. Musk has fluctuated between taking and leaving the deal several times until it was finalized. Alleging that the company failed to adequately disclose the number of spam and fake accounts on the service, he had almost backed off from the deal at one point, thereby putting him on a different page than the top executives including the erstwhile CEO Parag Agrawal.

In July, in a surprising turn of events, Elon Musk who had long been showing his interest to buy Twitter terminated the deal. The Tesla CEO did so by alleging that Twitter violated their mutual purchase agreement by misrepresenting the number of spam and fake bot accounts on its platform. After Musk put out the deal termination announcement, the market saw a sharp decline. Later, Twitter sued Musk accusing him of using bots as a pretext to exit a deal. However, last week, Musk confirmed that he would move forward with the Twitter buyout at the originally agreed price of USD 54.20 per share.