As far as I can guess, Elon believes that twitter's current crucial problem is the decrease in ads revenue due to the proliferation of extreme speech. Further, he believes that extreme speech is caused in large part by bots.<p>So he came up with the idea that makes some sense in theory: requiring users to pay for subscriptions. This would solve the problem of bots, and open up a second source of revenue beyond ads. Two birds with one stone.<p>But the reality, as we all already know, was that blind verification of subscribers led to serious impersonation.<p>If this approach doesn't work, then as a product manager, if you were Elon, how would you solve twitter's current problems to improve the speech environment and increase revenue?