Mr. Musk came to hate what he saw as Twitter’s two-tiered class system of the verified and unverified, and to him, selling off the check marks was the ultimate democratization of the site. Soon after completing his acquisition, he assigned Ms. Crawford to assemble a team and gave her a deadline of Nov. 7, 2022, for Blue’s relaunch. She had 10 days to deliver or risk being fired, three people with knowledge of the conversations said.
Many of the employees on the Blue team came to view the project as pointless at best and, at worst, something that could undermine trust. If everyone could be verified, then no one would truly be verified.
As one Blue worker later wrote in a journal: “It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible.”
While many people saw the check mark as a designation of fame, it became an important part of Twitter’s utility. It marked the real accounts for brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, making the platform much more attractive to advertisers. And it signified authenticity for governments and emergency services, which provided information about train delays, elections and tornado warnings.
Mr. Sacks insisted that they should raise the price to $20 a month, from its current $4.99. Anything less felt cheap to him, and he wanted to present Blue as a luxury good.
“Chanel could make a fortune selling a $99 bag, but it would be a one-time move,” he wrote. “A ‘promotional offer’ may not be the position we want. A luxury brand can always move down-market, but it’s very hard to move up-market once the brand is shot.”
Jason Calacanis, a friend of Mr. Musk’s, disagreed. “It should be $99 a year,” he insisted. During one meeting, he launched into a spiel about how Twitter users were more likely to open their wallets for a $100-per-year subscription if it seemed slightly cheaper at the $99 price, as though he had just watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of consumer psychology.
To employees, the discussions were baffling. There was Mr. Musk, a man who had built multibillion-dollar companies, soliciting advice from a small inner circle of advisers who had little experience building social networks. Sure, they used Twitter, but these rich men were not representative of the hundreds of millions of people who logged in every day.
Ms. Crawford came up with her own tactics for dealing with Mr. Musk. She quickly learned that she could challenge him in one-on-one settings. Individually, Mr. Musk could be charming, willing to engage in discussion and listen to the expertise of his counterpart. Put him in a larger group setting with people outside his inner circle or those he didn’t trust, however, and Mr. Musk’s ego ran wild. He could never be seen as inferior or uninformed.
As the new Blue came into focus, so did the fears about how it would be exploited for impersonation. What would happen if an account pretending to be a local fire department declared an emergency? Or an account posing as a politician spread a lie about an upcoming vote?
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The weekend before U.S. voters headed to the polls, Ms. Crawford made one last attempt in a private chat with her boss. “Do you want to be blamed for the outcome of this election?” she asked.
“Well, when is it?” Mr. Musk replied.
“It’s in two days,” Ms. Crawford said, stunned that he hadn’t clocked the date that she and her team had been warning him about since the start of the project.
Mr. Musk paused, processing. “Oh, I didn’t realize,” he said after a moment. “OK, yeah, it’s fine. We can wait. Why don’t we wait?”
The launch was moved to Nov. 9, the day after the election.
A software engineer calling in to the meeting posed a question to Mr. Musk: “What would you consider a serious incident that would require us to put back such a label or some other differentiation between accounts?”
Mr. Musk intertwined his fingers and paused for a few seconds.
“If there’s like death or serious injury or something like that, um, you know, uh,” he said, fidgeting. “Something beyond annoyance or mild confusion — that would be enough.”
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