On April 2, 2023, a Twitter user claimed that Elon Musk had increased the fee for Twitter Blue verification to $15 a month. The previously announced fee for the verification service, available to anyone willing to pay, was $8 a month.
"Elon has increased his nerd tax to $15/month," claimed LeGate on Twitter. The claim is false. Neither Musk nor Twitter announced a price increase. Rather, both Twitter and Musk drew attention to a discount the service offered to annual subscribers to Twitter Blue.
Twitter promptly attached a Community Note to LeGate's tweet, saying, "Twitter Blue costs $11 per month through Apple Store. Twitter Blue costs $7 per month if you prepay for a year or $8 per month on the website."
The information on Twitter's website gives details of the pricing for the verification service. For users in the United States, the fee is $11 through Apple Store and Google Play Store (Android) and $8 through the web. The annual prices, respectively, are $114.99 and $84.
Many celebrities and news organizations said they would refuse to pay for the verification service, regardless of the price. Among the latter was The New York Times. Musk pre-emptively withdrew the verification service for the newspaper on April 1, 2023, and also accused the Times of hypocrisy for inviting paid subscriptions from its readers.
Musk had flip-flopped on implementing Twitter Blue pricing after buying the social media company in October 2022 for $44 billion. The verification-for-all plan created a lot of headaches for the billionaire and the companies that suffered due to other users taking advantage of the service to impersonate their verified accounts on Twitter. Many of the top advertisers fled Twitter after Musk's takeover due to other policy changes.