Elon Musk's plan to charge for blue ticks risks Twitter's 'magic', says 'curious and worried' former executive

• A former Twitter executive said he is "curious and worried" about Elon Musk's plans for Twitter.
• Musk said this week he plans to charge Twitter users $8 a month for a blue-tick verification.

A former executive said Twitter was at risk of losing its "magic" and he was "curious and worried" about how Elon Musk planned to boost revenues, BBC News reported.

The new owner of Twitter said this week that users could be charged $8 a month for "verified" status and a blue tick. The fee could also mean subscribers are fed fewer ads and give their replies higher priority.

Brandon Borrman, the platform's former global communications chief, told BBC News on Thursday that such a policy could "stratify" Twitter if Musk goes ahead with his plans to make users subscribe to be verified.

"If charging for the blue tick was the fairest way to do it, I think Twitter probably would have done it a while ago," he told the outlet.

Musk's plans come the week after completing his $44 billion deal to buy the platform.

"It's great for people who have money and want to spend money on having their voice amplified," Borrman told BBC News. While "$8 might seem like nothing to a lot of people," he added that "it's quite substantial for most people."

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The former executive said rival platforms were "not consumer or user friendly" and that Twitter needed to "convince" users of the benefit of subscribing.

Borrman, who worked for three years until June 2021 and now works for Mozilla, said he was pleased to have left before Musk took over and that the atmosphere in the company was now "tense".

"Elon obviously has a particular way he likes to manage and approach things that's quite different from the way Twitter has been managed in the past," he told BBC News. "There's a lot of people who are in 'wait-and-see' mode."

Borrman did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.