- Elon Musk is haphazardly suggesting ways to "pay the bills" at Twitter as debt interest payments soon come due.
- His approach is starkly different than when he said he "didn't care about the economics" of buying it in April.
Not long after Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion in April, he said he "didn't care about the economics at all" of the purchase.
"This is just my strong, intuitive sense that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization," Musk said at the TED2022 conference.
Seven months later, the world's richest man seems to have changed his tune, haphazardly suggesting ideas to his advisors, and even his Twitter followers, in an attempt to make the platform profitable.
Earlier this week, Musk announced that Twitter would begin charging $8 per month for its "blue check" verification program, which was previously free to those who qualified.
"We need to pay the bills somehow!" Musk wrote in a tweet responding to complaints about the fee.
But that's not the only idea Musk has in mind to squeeze cash out of his new company. The New York Times reports that Musk and his advisers have weighed adding a service that would allow users to send direct messages to high-profile users for a fee and "paywalled" videos.
Musk has also considered charging for user analytics and reviving the short-form video platform, Vine, according to his interactions with followers on Twitter.
The rushed attempts to drum up new revenue streams at Twitter are at odds with how Musk spoke about the purchase of the social media platform last spring when he extolled the platform's virtue as a "de facto town square" and compared the Twitter deal to Jeff Bezos' purchase of The Washington Post.
Now, Musk has Twitter employees working 24/7, trying to find a way to make to eke out money from the platform as Twitter will eventually be expected to pay massive interest payments. Musk borrowed $13 billion from banks to partially fund the deal, and the company will have to pay $1 billion in annual interest as a result. Twitter's entire cash flow last year totaled less than $1 billion, according to the Times.
Charging for previously free services isn't the only way Musk has tried to save the company money. On Thursday night and Friday morning, large swaths of Twitter's staff learned they had been laid off, either via email or by simply losing access to their Slack and email accounts.