Musk immediately fired the top three Twitter executives. About a week later, he began laying off about half of the company's approximately 7,500 employees. Post-acqusition A week after the takeover, Musk revamped Twitter Blue, increasing its price to $8 per month and adding new features, including the "blue checkmark" verification that had previously been reserved for high-profile confirmed users. This plan was criticized by several outlets, fearing that the potential for misinformation would increase since anyone could pay to appear to be verified through Twitter Blue. Musk opted to delay the changes to blue checkmarks until after the 2022 United States elections over these concerns, and stated that accounts that were faking identities, outside of parody accounts, would be terminated. Following the takeover, various brands and companies paused advertising on the platform. Musk undid the prior ban on Donald Trump on November 19, 2022, following a poll Musk posted in favor of lifting the ban. Musk also unbanned other notable accounts that had been banned for misinformation previously, including The Babylon Bee and Jordan Peterson. Musk also unbanned Kanye West; a few weeks later, he re-instituted his ban after West posted a series of tweets that Musk said were incitement to violence, including one that posted a swastika within the Jewish star. During December 2022, Musk provided internal documentation to a number of independent journalists and writers which were then publicly disseminated through a series of posts known as the "Twitter Files". The files describe internal discussion as related to Twitter's moderation steps in events such as the breaking of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, shadow banning of some conservative commentators' accounts, and the decision to block Trump. While some on the right saw the documents as evidence of Twitter's liberal bias and hostility to free speech, many people on the left described them as a reflection of how difficult it is for social media platforms to make tough decisions about content moderation. The Twitter accounts of a number of journalists were permanently suspended on December 15, 2022. These journalists, including Mashable's Matt Binder, Aaron Rupar, Ryan Mac of The New York Times''', and CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, have covered Twitter and recently wrote articles about Musk's takeover. Several of the reporters had recently tweeted about the controversy over Musk's banning of ElonJet and other accounts which track private jets.Elon Musk's Twitter bans accounts of CNN, NYT, WaPo journalists. Oliver Darcy,