If he's that desperate for money why would he phase it out?

This over-exploitation is a clear fulcrum for the failure of the platform and could undermine a future payday.

This is enshittification - pillage the brand for short-term gain, long-term loss, thinking that something is worth more dead than alive. Either Musk is trying to pillage the bluecheck system (he thinks its' worthless and wants to extract some value before he kills it), or Twitter itself (get some short-term revenue from blue-check-chuds so he can make the site look slightly more profitable so he can sell it off).

But at $8/mo? Celebrities and influencers can afford way more than that.

$8/mo is the price range that attracts scammers and hustlers that care about showing up in the first 5 replies of a major tweet so they can spam their product to a large audience.

>$8/mo is the price range that attracts scammers and hustlers

Don't forget about the trolls!

The point is you can't do this with any kind of scale needed to swamp users, which is a real fear with autogenerated text nowadays.

I think Musk never quite understood how other people see the blue tick. In his own experience on Twitter, he probably noticed that verified users were made more visible in his replies, feed, etc., and he seems to think that that is the primary benefit.

I think he's underestimating the damage he's doing to the site. Every respectable person is looking for the exit, it's just that the Twitter moat is very high. But it's not limitless. If any twitter alternative like Mastodon or Notes or BlueSky or whatever gets real traction, Twitter is going the way of Digg.