Elon Musk Will Start Charging $20 For Twitter Checkmarks & He's Laughing At The Reactions

We're less than one week into the Elon Musk era at Twitter, and the self-declared "Chief Twit" is already preparing to make users pay up.

Musk will reportedly make verification a paid service on Twitter, with users required to pay US $20 to get a blue checkmark on their accounts, The Verge reports.

"The whole verification process is being revamped right now," Musk tweeted on Sunday night, without going into specifics.

The blue checkmark will reportedly be folded into the platform's Twitter Blue premium service, and users will need to keep paying that $20 each month to keep their status.

Twitter verification has been free up until this point, just as it is on Instagram and Facebook. Verification is used to flag legitimate public figures, such as politicians, celebrities, official brands and journalists.

Twitter Blue is a separate feature that gives users more options, such as an edit button and the ability to monetize their content.

Twitter Blue launched with a $5 subscription fee last year, but it seems that will quadruple under the new meme-lord-in-chief. Those who are already verified will have 90 days to subscribe to the service or they'll lose their checkmark.

Musk has also reportedly told his staff that they have until November 7 to roll out the new feature. Otherwise, they'll all be fired.

The new Twitter boss hasn't commented yet on the $20 policy, but he did mock the news by responding to a parody announcement about his plans.

"Oh no, all our diabolical plans have been revealed!!" he wrote.

Reactions to the move have been pretty split.

"Paying $20 to keep a blue check to your twitter handle seems like a waste of money," tweeted author Joe Hill, "though not as big a waste as spending ($)44 billion to buy the place."

Several people pointed out that verification is helpful on Twitter, because it helps users figure out who can be trusted.

"The idea of forcing people to pay for blue checks gets Twitter's value proposition totally backward," wrote Democratic activist Max Berger.

"For Twitter to have value, it needs to provide valid information from legitimate sources. If anyone can pay for the appearance of validity, the site loses all value."

Another user ran a poll asking how much people would pay for a verified checkmark on Twitter. The poll piled up more than 830,000 responses, with over 80% saying they simply wouldn't pay for it.

Twitter has already started to change dramatically since Musk took over.

For one, many users who were previously banned for hate speech have since returned to the platform.

The use of racial slurs, particularly the "N word," have also spiked since Musk took over, according to a watchdog group called the Network Contagion Research Institute.

However, Twitter's head of safety and integrity says that's simply due to a "trolling campaign" that's taken off in recent days.

"Bottom line up front: Twitter's policies haven't changed," he wrote. "hateful conduct has no place here. And we're taking steps to put a stop to an organized effort to make people think we have."

Musk has spent much of his first few days tweeting jokes, boasting about his ideas and floating other possible ideas for his die-hard fans on Twitter.

"Bring back Vine?" he asked late Sunday, in a Twitter poll that drew more than 2.6 million votes. About 70% of respondents chose yes.

Musk also tweeted a baseless conspiracy theory at Hillary Clinton over the weekend, though he later deleted it and then took a jab at the New York Times instead.

What a week!