Elon Musk, the billionaire who recently took Twitter private with a $44 billion acquisition, has told engineers at the social media company to look at resurrecting Vine, the video app purchased by Twitter in 2012 and shuttered just four years later, according to a report from Axios.
Musk, who recently changed his Twitter bio to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator,” tweeted a poll on Sunday asking if he should bring back Vine, with 70% of people responding that he should. The poll garnered over 4.9 million responses.
Vine, if actually resurrected, would have an uphill battle against platforms that offer short-form video content like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. And it’s not clear how much sense it would make to use Vine’s old code as opposed to starting from scratch, given that it “needs a lot of work,” according to one Twitter employee who spoke with Axios.
Musk has been a demanding boss, according to multiple reports about his short time at the helm, and there’s even a demand that Twitter employees work 24/7 to accomplish various ideas from the new head of the company, according to Business Insider.
One of those ideas is a new stab at so-called verification on the platform, the little blue checkmark that verifies that Twitter knows how to Google that particular user, which may cost a subscription fee each month. Jason Calacanis, a friend of Musk’s who was brought on to work at Twitter, issued a poll asking how much users would be willing to pay for verification. Roughly 81% of 1.9 million respondents said they wouldn’t pay, with smaller numbers answering that they’d pay anywhere from $5 to $15.
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Musk has dissolved the Twitter board and installed himself as CEO, despite working as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. And there are multiple reports that employees from those two companies have been brought in to help with various tasks at Twitter. The obvious question, of course, is whether the shareholders at a publicly traded company will be happy that workers at Tesla are being pulled off their regular assignments to help with a completely unrelated company.