[realmod]

He, undoubtedly, overpaid for Twitter. Also, the blue-check allows key users to distinguish themselves and is one major reason that "notable" people are using Twitter for essentially all their communications. Elon's plan to diminish the blue-check by giving it to anyone who has verified themselves by buying Twitter Blue would be very destructive and hurt Twitter's moat.

-- Edit --

Actually, disregard the blue-check comment. I oversold it. A blue-check is actually not that important.

[paulgb]

I kinda doubt it. Notable people were using Twitter long before blue checks were a thing, and although people threaten to leave twitter for other platforms, they usually come back.

Instead, I think his ideas for blue check verification won’t happen because blue checks are unofficially a carrot that Twitter can hang for brands that spend on their ad platform.

[realmod]

I wasn't even considering the people who threatened to leave in response to Elon's takeover - the true number would be inconsequential.

> Notable people were using Twitter long before blue checks were a thing

True. Now that I think about it, I most definitely oversold it. Blue-check is a nice to have benefit but notable accounts are still today religiously using Twitter despite not being verified. I think I was focusing too much on the journalist clique on Twitter and their excessive desire for a blue-check.

[trixie_]

Overpaid? There’s a good chance he can 10x Twitters value. He could make the previous 10 year business model look embarrassing. There is so much low hanging fruit out there to improve. The management/board of Twitter has been a train wreck.

[WesleyHale]

the blue check is already meaningless. It's been handed out to people with 100's of followers and no names.

[ericmay]

He could maybe do different colored "verified" (maybe green?) checks.

Obviously anyone with a blue check is going to be inclined to defend the exclusivity of it, but that's the problem. There are also notable people who aren't verified because they didn't jump through Twitter's hoops to become verified.

Personally I'd like to see real human verification and filtering based on "real human" and I'd pay for something like Twitter Blue if it had this. Sam Harris recently interviewed Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) and he had a very interesting and related point which was free speech should be just for real humans, bots don't have such rights. Unfortunately it seems that there is Blue Checkmark land and then spam land for the rest of us. If it kills Twitter for certain people to lose their status symbol, well, it would have killed Twitter in the long run anyway by maintaining it.