On Wednesday, new Twitter CEO Elon Musk abruptly ended a new project on his social media platform.
Twitter began rolling out a new designation labeled “official” on some larger accounts on Wednesday morning, but Musk replied to a Twitter user later in the day saying “I just killed it,” regarding the project.
Upon his purchase of the social media company, Musk revamped Twitter Blue, a subscription service where users can pay $7.99 for a verified badge. The new “official” label was set to differentiate verified accounts from high-profile accounts that have been authenticated by Twitter. The “official” label was not scheduled to be awarded to all verified accounts, and was not available for purchase.
“Accounts that will receive it include government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures,” Twitter product executive Esther Crawford said earlier this week, prior to the feature being shut down on Wednesday.
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“The problem with the official badge, aside from being an aesthetic nightmare, is that it’s another way of creating a two-class system,” Musk said during a Wednesday afternoon Twitter Space.
After eliminating the feature, Musk admitted that “Twitter will do lots of dumb things in the coming months.”
Twitter fired roughly half its staff in late October after Musk acquired the platform. Other tech giants including Meta
META,
Lyft Inc.
LYFT,
and Zillow Group Inc.
Z,
have also announced layoffs in recent months.
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It was also revealed on Tuesday that Musk sold nearly $4 billion worth of Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
stock in the past three trading sessions.
Musk, who already sold over $31 billion in Tesla shares over the past year, said in April that he had “no further TSLA sales planned after today.”
