Elon Musk had planned on relaunching the new Twitter Blue on November 29th, however now it appears it is going to be a while still.

Holding off relaunch of Blue Verified until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.

Will probably use different color check for organizations than individuals.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 22, 2022

Seems odd given they just had added a 90-day waiting period for new Twitter accounts to be able to subscribe to Twitter Blue. I really wondering if it is more because he doesn’t have the staff left anymore (and does not want to admit it) to get the relaunch going as planned. At least 1200 employees opted to keep their sanity and get three months severance by not wanting to join Musk for a hardcore and intense work (toxic) environment with Twitter 2.0 last week. Those were in addition to the 3700 who were laid off earlier this month. There were also rumors of more layoffs in the company’s sales and partnerships teams as early as today (both team leads Musk ended up firing after they pushed back against having their teams cut even further).  While this did not happen (yet), Musk did send out a puzzling and alarming email over the weekend “Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor.”  Has everyone that  ‘actually writes software’ quit or in the case of many in the Android ‘division’ been fired?

According to a report from The Verge, Musk also talked about building features like encrypted direct messages and video calls in an internal presentation named “Twitter 2.0.” This is not the first time he has talked about introducing end-to-end encrypted DMs. Musk hinted that Twitter is working on this feature in a reply to app research Jane Manchun Wong’s tweet that highlighted code related to that. Earlier this month, the Twitter CEO said that the “goal of Twitter DM is to superset Signal.”

Advertisers were already leaving in droves since Elon took over and more on the fence now with the increased prevalence of hate speech lately (which along with Musk’s other recent actions is a ‘growing concern to Germany‘ plus Musk lifted Donald Trumps permeant ban from Twitter. However, Trump has indicated he has no interest in returning to Twitter. Musk has made it clear “Twitter can not be dependent on advertisers alone” which was why getting revenue from Twitter Blue subscriptions was so important. However, the relaunch earlier this month turned into free-for-all mess with numerous fake ‘verified’ accounts being created and impersonating the legitimate accounts (including Elon’s) with the most high profile being pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.  However, it sounds as if there are not any engineers left to make Musk’s new feature ideas a realty much less keep the current ‘workings’ of Twitter running. It does not sound like Musk wants to hire new talent (not that many people would even consider joining as Twitter’s ‘dirty laundry’ has been out for the whole world to see for nearly a month). Twitter is on life support as it is, all it would take is a regulatory shut down (such as banning Twitter in their country) or the very least fines to end up landing Twitter in bankruptcy as Elon had warned.

via Tech Crunch