Elon Musk

Twitter employees have been informed of additional changes coming to Blue, such as a 1 cent price hike from $7.99 to $8 and the need for a phone number verification, reports The Verge. When Twitter's new Blue subscription arrives on iOS, it might not be offered as an in-app purchase to avoid Apple's 30 per cent cut of App Store purchases.

According to Media Matters in America, 50 of the top 100 advertisers have spent nearly $2 billion on the platform since 2020, and more than $750 million on advertising in 2022 alone. Furthermore, as of November 21, seven additional advertisers seem to be reducing their advertising on Twitter to almost nothing, in addition to those who appear to have stopped advertising.

Musk, who sacked more than half of Twitter's workforce, said that "world-class software aces are joining Twitter". Sharing some company slides he shared with Twitter employees, the world's richest man said the next-gen Twitter will focus on advertising as entertainment and video. "We're recruiting. User active minutes are at an all time high and monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) have crossed a quarter-billion mark," Musk informed.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has publicly expressed a desire to improve the social network's direct messages work. According to The Verge, Musk told his employees that the company would encrypt DMs and work to add encrypted video and voice calling between accounts.

At a meeting with employees, Musk also claimed that Twitter is now actively hiring for positions in engineering and sales, reports The Verge. He also asked the staffers to recommend potential candidates. The micro-blogging platform does not currently have any open positions advertised on its website, and Musk did not name the specific engineering or sales posts for which the company was seeking.

Musk has fired almost half of Twitter employees, apart from sacking thousands of contractual workers. More than 1,200 employees have resigned on their own owing to the fear of working in an "extremely hardcore" work environment, bringing the once 7,800-strong Twitter workforce to less than 3,000 workers as of now. "First @elonmusk took over company, fired incompetent mgmt and then did layoffs in a bloated organisation," Grover said in a tweet.

The new Twitter CEO said that the Trump poll was getting a massive 1 million votes per hour. "Fascinating to watch the Twitter Trump poll. The bot attack is impressive to watch," tweeted Elon Musk. "Bot & troll armies might be running out of steam soon. Some interesting lessons to clean up future polls," he added.

Musk made the comment during a testimony at a trial in the US on Wednesday, challenging his controversial pay compensation package at Tesla. "I frankly don't want to be the CEO of any company," he said, reports The Verge. "At SpaceX, it's really that I'm responsible for the engineering of the rockets and Tesla for the technology in the car that makes it successful," he was quoted as saying.

Musk, who laid off about 3,800 full-time employees and more than 5,000 contractual workers is additionally getting rid of anyone who dares criticise him. Platformer's Casey Newton put the number of those sacked closer to 20 software engineer and tech writer Gergely Orosz tweeted that around 10 people have been fired for speaking up internally against Musk. "For those saying that criticising should be done in private: I have reports for a number of employees similarly terminated the past 24 hours.

The saga began on Sunday when Musk posted a tweet to apologise for the micro-blogging platform's bad performance in "many countries" and claimed that the application makes over 1,000 "poorly batched" remote procedure calls to "render a home timeline", reports The Verge.