| Hi, it's Josh in New York. Elon Musk's Twitter revolution is in its score-settling phase. But first... Today's must-reads: • Musk consolidated control of Twitter after the entire board was dismissed
• Two Apple executives in charge of key divisions are stepping down
• An iPhone factory worker walked 25 miles to escape Covid lockdowns When he bought Twitter Inc. last week, Elon Musk acquired a company with a lot of problems. One of his challenges is going to be setting priorities. Should he first overhaul Twitter's content moderation policies? Improve its strategy for preventing malicious bot activity? Cut the staff to whatever level he thinks will make the company operate at maximum efficiency? Anyone trying to figure out how he'd run the company could learn something by seeing what he paid most attention to first. Musk's first big initiative, according to press reports, is to tell employees to immediately come up with a plan to charge people for verified accounts. Since 2009, verified accounts have been marked with blue check marks, signifying that they are of some public interest and are actually what they appear to be. Under the plan, people who want to keep their verification would have to subscribe to Twitter Blue, the company's $5 monthly subscription plan. Musk is reportedly also considering raising the price of Blue to $20. Twitter has always relied heavily on advertising—last year it accounted for 89% of the company's revenue. At first glance, pushing people into paid subscriptions has the potential to establish a solid new revenue stream, especially if the company simultaneously quadruples the price! The numbers don't seem exactly transformational once you add them up, though. The Twitter Verified account, which follows each blue check mark, follows just under 424,000 accounts. If all of them decided they couldn't live without verification, Twitter would end up with approximately $102 million in additional revenue. This would mean an increase in its non-advertising revenue of almost 20%, and a bump in total revenue of about 2%. If just one person ponied up, Twitter would make about $240. The reality would likely be somewhere in between. Musk's plan makes more sense if you consider the noneconomic implications. For years, there's been a culture war raging on the site over the check marks. A subset of Twitter's user base—notably extremely online right-wingers—have fixated on the check marks as yet another symbol of how the establishment claims unearned authority over everyone else. Twitter has also periodically de-verified accounts that break its policies, tying the verification process into complaints about the liberal bias of its content moderation. Since the beginning, Musk has obviously seen buying Twitter as a great troll. But until last week the question theoretically remained open of how he'd balance that urge with his presumed desire not to drive his new $44 billion toy into a ditch. Hours before the deal closed, Musk posted an open letter to advertisers praising "highly relevant advertising" and saying he aspired to run the "most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise." The letter was an indication, it appeared, that Musk was taking his financial risk seriously, and finally wanted to play it straight. Nope. Within days Musk had tweeted a risible conspiracy theory about the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, then deleted it, then denied having deleted it, calling the New York Times fake news in the process. This is what the burn-it-all-down crowd was hoping for from Musk as "Chief Twit." It's also the kind of stuff that delights the crowd that is amused by Twitter employees losing their jobs, or thrilled that people who have little blue check marks by their usernames are finally getting their comeuppance. As an actual policy, though, revamping the site's verification policies is likely to push against other things Musk says he cares about. Even before he started buying Twitter shares, he'd complained about accounts impersonating him on Twitter. And when he wanted to get out of the deal, he focused on how many bot accounts there were on the platform. Turning verification into a paid product will exacerbate Twitter's content quality problems. Tellingly, it assumes that blue checks are a benefit to the accounts that get them—akin to decorations people buy for their online avatars. Actually, the beneficiaries are supposed to be other people using the site, trying to differentiate between what's real and what's not. If a lot of people opt out of verification, it puts added strain on people trying to determine if people posting are who they say they are. There's also the question of how any additional chaos will affect Twitter's already-touchy relationship with advertisers. Of course, maybe the blue check-marked users will all realize that they really are willing to pay any price to retain their status on the site, and Twitter will bring in millions without much else changing on the platform. It's still too early to tell what impacts the Musk revolution will bring to Twitter. But for now, it's clear that we're still in the score-settling phase. —Joshua Brustein Japan's best stock this year is a little-known games publisher called Bank of Innovation. In-game content in its latest release is twice as expensive as comparable content from local competitors, and the company's share price is up 790% this year. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said Saudi Arabian backing for Musk's purchase of Twitter should be scrutinized by a government panel that reviews national security risks from foreign investments in the US. A small Japanese startup wants to go to the moon. Some people reported problems using Instagram on Monday, including having their accounts suspended. 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