[everfrustrated]

From tweets Elon made before becoming the CEO of twitter, it seemed this was the approach he was aiming for.

I can only speculate that he dropped the identity verification part to get this to market quicker as this is the part which would have required new investment/systems/vendors.

I speculate taking a payment would have been relatively low complexity for Twitter to implement and possibly could have leveraged existing internal systems.

I wouldn't be surprised if one day Elon suddenly announces everybody paying $8/mth now needs to submit identity docs to continue to use service.