Elon Musk’s Twitter is planning to charge $20 PER MONTH for Verified Handles

New ‘Twitter Blue’ subscription feature is on track to be deployed next week – or else employees will be fired

• On Sunday, Elon Musk informed Twitter engineers that they had little more than a week to roll out a $20 per month fee for users to remain verified
• According to a report, Musk said that if the new scheme is not up-and-running by November 7, the team charged with the project will be fired
• On the same day that the article was published, Musk tweeted: ‘The whole verification process is being revamped right now’
• There are around 400,000 verified users on Twitter
• The news comes as Musk is roundly criticized for posting a falsified story regarding the recent assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul 

Just days after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has issued an ultimatum to engineers over a new project.

According to a report from The Verge, Musk wants to launch a pay-for-play verification system in which verified users are charged $20 per month. 

The kicker is that engineers have until November 7 to launch the scheme or face being fired. Employees were only told of the project on October 30. 

The Verge report says that the price of the verification is subject to change. The price will also cover so-far unspecified other features. 

Since Musk first offered to buy Twitter, the world’s wealthiest man has made it clear he planned to shake things up at the social media giant. 

Hours before The Verge report emerged, Musk tweeted: ‘The whole verification process is being revamped right now.’

Earlier, tech website Platformer’s Casey Newton reported that Twitter was leaning towards asking for verified users to pay for the privilege.

DailyMail.com has asked Twitter for comment on this story.

There are close to 400,000 verified users on Twitter. Making them pay could help the platform stay afloat after reports that bots make up five percent of all users and ‘heavy tweeters’ make up less than 10 percent of the site’s monthly users.

Less active users mean less eyeballs for advertisers. During the court battle to acquire Twitter, Musk himself claimed that fewer than 16 million users are able to see the vast majority of ads.

Musk has also refuted a New York Times story accusing the Tesla-founder of planning a series of layoffs before November 1, in order to avoid paying staff their annual stock grants.  

In responding to ProPublica’s Eric Umansky tweeting the Times story, Musk simply wrote: ‘This is false.’ 

Later, Musk took further aim at the newspaper of record in tweeting a screenshot of a headline from NYTimes.com accusing him of posting a link to a fake story surrounding the assault on Paul Pelosi. 

The headline read: ‘Elon Musk, in a Tweet, Shares Link From Site Known to Publish Fake News.’ 

Musk quipped: ‘This is fake – I did *not* tweet out a link to the New York Times.’

Musk earlier deleted a tweet suggesting Paul Pelosi’s attacker was a gay prostitute he met during a boozy night out.

The tweet shared a link to an article suggesting the House Speaker’s husband left a San Francisco gay bar with David DePape prior to his assault. But it no longer appears on the new Twitter CEO’s page — just hours after it was posted.

He has now been accused of ‘caving into the leftist mob’.

Musk had posted the theory in response to a tweet by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in which she claimed that the attack on the 82-year-old was the fault of Republican ‘mouthpieces’ spreading ‘hate and deranged conspiracy theories’.

‘There’s a tiny possibility there may be more to this story than meets the eye,’ the 51-year-old billionaire responded, sharing a link to a story published by an obscure outlet called the Santa Monica Observer.

It seemed to have crashed since the story was first highlighted by Musk, with would-be readers receiving an error page reading that the site’s webserver, Cloudflare, was ‘returning an unknown error’ according to Axios.