Ellise Shafer It appears that Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has restored blue check marks to popular users overnight — and some of them are taking to the platform to clarify that they didn’t pay for the perk. Musk detailed his plan to remove legacy blue checks soon after he acquired Twitter in October 2022, trashing the company’s previous account-verification policy as “corrupt and nonsensical.” Musk’s new policy went into effect in April 2023 and to keep the checks, users were required to subscribe to Twitter Blue (now called X Premium), which starts at $8 per month.