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Hey, it’s Mark. Elon Musk’s plan to combat Twitter bots sounds a lot like an idea for email spam that Bill Gates once floated. But first…Tod [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hey, it’s Mark. Elon Musk’s plan to combat Twitter bots sounds a lot like an idea for email spam that Bill Gates once floated. But first… Today’s must-reads: • Musk plans to cut [half of the jobs at Twitter]( • Real estate platform Opendoor is [laying off about 550 employees]( • The first edition of Bloomberg’s new cybersecurity newsletter examines “[scam rap](” — like hip hop, but the lyrics are about identity theft Billionaires would like you to pay up Elon Musk and Bill Gates [don’t often agree]( on things, but the billionaires each came up with the same idea (only two decades apart): charging people for internet services that have always been free. Musk will ask users of Twitter Inc. to [pay $8 a month]( for access to special features, including one that’s currently gratis for public figures, the blue check mark. There’s an element of, as we’ve written in this newsletter, wanting to troll the blue checks. (“[Power to the people!](”) There’s also a financial consideration. (“[We need to pay the bills somehow!](”) But the primary reason, at least according to Musk, is to address the issue with Twitter that has [most captured his attention](: spam. Musk said charging for verification is “the only way to defeat the bots & trolls” and that he would explain his rationale in detail later — [a promise he made publicly](, oddly enough, to the horror novelist Stephen King. You don’t have to wait for the Twitter Master Plan to get an explanation. He’s more or less outlined one in his other tweets. In addition to being branded with a blue check mark, posts from subscribers will be [placed above]( those from free users throughout the app. Paid accounts that violate spam rules will be [suspended](. Musk [joked]( that he “stole the idea of charging for insults & arguments from Monty Python,” but he more likely — maybe subconsciously — stole it from Gates. The last time a tech billionaire was talking this much about spam was almost 20 years ago when the Microsoft Corp. co-founder testified to the US Senate about email. In 2003, he decried that spam accounted for half of all email sent, outlined technology Microsoft was developing to combat it and endorsed an effort to legislate it. A year later, Gates expanded on the spam problem at the World Economic Forum. He [described]( three ways Microsoft was approaching the battle and declared that spam email would be eliminated within two years. (And you thought [Musk’s predictions]( were bad.) The first two solutions involved variations of a whitelist, where email addresses in a user’s contact list are waved through and unknown senders must solve a puzzle to have their messages transmitted. The third was more controversial. Gates said strangers would be required to purchase a sort of digital postage stamp. The idea was to implement a nominal fee for people to reach, in Gates’s words, “your long-lost brother” while making the cost of sending spam in bulk prohibitive. Microsoft was actually well-positioned at the time to force such a radical change. Its free email service, MSN Hotmail, had by some estimates a third of the market. Yahoo!, a close No. 2, also [entertained]( the email stamp idea. As you might expect, people hated it. Five months after his speech in Davos, Switzerland, Gates backed away from the concept. He wrote in a [newsletter]( (at the time called an “executive email”) that Microsoft was experimenting with a different system asking companies to post a bond as collateral to demonstrate their emails were legitimate. “We firmly believe that monetary charges would be inappropriate and contrary to the fundamental purpose of the Internet as an extremely efficient and inexpensive medium for communications,” he wrote in 2004. It turns out that, contrary to basic economic theory, charging money doesn’t guarantee valuable discourse. The incentive for a business to game the system for financial gain outweighs a person’s desire to email their plumber. Just consider all the junk that goes through the post office. Gates was aware of this, too. In his 1995 book, the Road Ahead, he complained about junk mail. Microsoft eventually got supplanted by Google as the dominant email provider. Spam was one of the original reasons Paul Buchheit set out to create Gmail. In 2007, Buchheit [blogged]( about a proposal to charge businesses for guaranteed delivery of email, writing, “It’s tempting to think that such schemes, although distasteful, are necessary to fight spam. They are not.” He suggested that spam could be addressed through a reputation system, and Gmail proved his theory to be pretty effective. Now back to Twitter: Why is it that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube don’t have a spam problem as severe as Twitter’s? No one pays for the blue check mark on TikTok. It’s possible there are some trade secrets that the newest social media mogul has yet to learn. —[Mark Milian](mailto:mmilian@bloomberg.net) The big story With little warning, China locked down the world’s largest iPhone factory on Wednesday, declaring the zone around the Zhengzhou Foxconn complex off limits after a local Covid-19 outbreak. It’s the [last thing Apple needed](. Get fully charged Google is preparing an [AI program that will create art]( from text prompts. European fintech Revolut still believes in its [cryptocurrency offering](, despite the product’s plunging revenue. Retail Amazon investors are rushing to [buy the dip](. The largest US Latino civil rights organization says it was shut out of a meeting with Elon Musk when Twitter’s new owner [invited its ousted leader to the table](. A cyber security leader describes the state of [Ukraine’s internet infrastructure]( to Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. [Sign up for Cyber Bulletin](, our new weekly newsletter on cybersecurity, for exclusive coverage inside the shadow world of hackers and cyber espionage — and how businesses are playing defense. Follow Us More from Bloomberg Dig gadgets or video games? [Sign up for Power On]( to get Apple scoops, consumer tech news and more in your inbox on Sundays. [Sign up for Game On]( to go deep inside the video game business, delivered on Fridays. Why not try both? Like getting this newsletter? 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