Will Elon Musk introduce a new feature to charge Twitter users to DM celebrities?

Tesla CEO Elon Musk paid for Twitter much more than its original market value, which is determined on the basis of how much a single share costs. Having overpaid for Twitter, the Tesla CEO is now trying to find ways to monetise the app. Musk overpaid for Twitter by about $20 billion, as per Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who told CBS MoneyWatch that he believed that would force the billionaire to cut between 30% to 50% of the firm's employees.

Twitter received 90 percent of its revenue from digital ads, and now many prominent brands are suspending their ads on the social media platform, as a result Twitter's revenue has fallen down. The importance of finding alternative sources of revenue for the micro blogging site is now a priority for Musk. 

According to a report from NYTimes, one of the ideas Musk and his advisors are toying with is paid DMs i.e. a regular user of Twitter will have to pay money to message a 'celebrity'. As per the report, a brand-new feature is being floated by Musk that would be opt-in and the messages wouldn't be unsolicited, with Twitter celebs setting their own price. The social media platform would then take an unspecified cut of the payments. Another idea Musk and his advisors are reportedly considering is - paywalled videos i.e. one will not be able to watch video unless one pays for them. 

Why is Musk under pressure to monetize Twitter? 

Musk's eagerness to come up with different ideas to monetise Twitter reveals the pressure he is under that is to make the social media platform profitable. Musk's acquisition of Twitter is the technology industry's biggest ever leveraged buyout.  In the year of 2021, Twitter's cashflow was reportedly less than $1 billion. Now Musk has put the company in a situation where it is $13 billion in debt and owes more than $1 billion each year in interest, according to NY Times.

Musk cannot afford to just cut the costs, he has to increase the revenue as well. He has already started acting on the 'cutting costs' party by firing nearly half of Twitter's workforce and is now attempting to find a way to increase its revenue. Musk is also trying to minimise Twitter's infrastructure expenditure. The aim is to save $1 million - $3 million per day, "to make ends meet" as Musk said to the author Stephen King. Musk has given people at Twitter the deadline of 7th november to implement his vision of charging people for the blue tick verification badge. Esther Crawford, a product manager at Twitter, shared a photo of herself sleeping on the floor at the office, to meet the deadline, as per a report from NYTimes.