After negotiating for months, Twitter was finally purchased by Elon Musk for 44 billion dollars. Former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey founded the app in March of 2007. Twitter quickly emerged under his reign and became a quick way for news to spread fast.

One of Elon’s first moves was firing 3,700 employees, which is about 50% of staff right before the holidays. Elon thought Twitter had too much staff and they were focusing on the wrong departments for the social media website.

“The waves of annoyance and frustration and all that stuff are absolutely mitigated by the extreme solidarity we’ve seen from people that are in the company,” Former Twitter employee said, according to CNN Business. 

Not only has Musk changed half of the staff, he changed the way creators can become verified on Twitter. Now to get verified, users must pay an eight dollar monthly subscription fee. Those who had a blue check before the switch must pay to keep it. Musk also cannot make up his mind whether he wants the check blue or gray. With this subscription Musk feels that it will make up the app’s revenue. 

Making this new policy created more chaos than it should have. Users were making accounts with impersonated names and getting them verified to only post fake tweets. For example, (fake) LeBron James posted how he wanted to be traded from the Lakers. Many accounts like this were taken down in just hours. 

“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended. Basically, ticking people is not ok,” Elon Musk said according to his Twitter account (@elonmusk).

Musk has completely washed out what ‘verification’ means. Before, it was used to know that the well known people we followed were real, and had their own identity to post their content. Now it’s made out to be Twitter’s income.

Musk plans on many more controversial changes for Twitter. He promises to keep what works and get rid of what doesn’t. Since Musk bought Twitter, the use of the app has reached an all time high, but many say the app will soon go downhill.