On Saturday (April 9), Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, suggested some changes to the Twitter Blue premium membership subscription, including lowering the price, eliminating advertisements, and allowing users to pay in dogecoin ($DOGE).
As CNBC reported on Monday (April 4), Musk holds 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, which represents a 9.2% passive interest in the social media giant.
The next day, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced Musk’s appointment to the company’s board of directors:
I’m excited to share that we’re appointing @elonmusk to our board! Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board.
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) April 5, 2022
And Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO, seemed to show his joy as well:
Seems @paraga and @btaylor and @jack are “so excited” to have @elonmusk on @Twitter’s board that they waited for him to buy up 9.2% of its stock.
It’s not like to they could have invited him to join at any time. 🙄— Tim Culpan (@tculpan) April 5, 2022
It’s important to note that Musk had criticised Twitter less than two weeks before for not fully supporting free speech.
Twitter Blue, which was introduced in June last year, is a subscription service for paid users to access exclusive features such as personalised Twitter app icons, bookmark folders, tweet undo, and reader mode. The subscription is around $3 per month and is available on Twitter for iOS, Android, and the web in Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand.
The prolific Twitter user and Dogecoin advocate, in a series of tweets yesterday, suggested some ways to enhance Twitter Blue.
Musk recommended that people signing up for Twitter Blue should pay substantially less than the current $2.99 (€2.75) per month and should get an authentication checkmark in addition to the option to pay in local currency.
Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (ie pays $3/month) should get an authentication checkmark
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 10, 2022
“And no ads,” Musk said. “The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive”.
In addition, the CEO proposed an option to pay with dogecoin and asked Twitter users for their opinions.
Maybe even an option to pay in Doge?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 10, 2022
Dogecoin was launched by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a “fun and friendly internet currency.” on 6 December 2013. It is a “decentralised, peer-to-peer digital money” that features the Japanese dog breed Shiba Inu as its mascot. Currently, it is the 11th most valuable cryptocurrency, with a market capitalisation of about $20 billion.
On 1 April 2019, Dogecoin’s Twitter account administrators ran a Twitter poll to choose who the Dogecoin community believes should be the honorary “CEO”.
The next day, Musk — who had previously described Bitcoin’s structure as “pretty cool” in a February 2019 podcast interview — learned about this survey and responded with the following tweet:
Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It’s pretty cool.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2019
Musk discussed Bitcoin and its shortcomings as a payment method in late December 2021 during an interview for episode #252 of the Lex Fridman podcast. The CEO said that Bitcoin has very limited transaction volume and the latency for confirmed transactions is too long. Meanwhile, Dogecoin has a considerably bigger transaction value capability than Bitcoin, and Dogecoin transaction fees are meagre.
Twitter made no response to Musk’s recommendations. The firm currently enables users to tip their favourite content creators with bitcoin. Twitter said last year that it would allow non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are digital assets like photos or movies, to go live on the blockchain.