Pay per reply. Attach a cash bounty to your direct message to get a reply from a busy person with an overflowing inbox.
People are busy. I imagine that high-profile individuals are flooded with inbound messages they have no hope of sifting through. For them, the direct messaging function on any platform is unusable.
Put your money on the line if you are serious about reaching out to a high-profile individual who gets pestered with messages just like yours.
Incentivize people to spend their time reading what you have to say. They might not need the money or might not want to be contacted, but could find it amusing to see what people are willing to pay to have seen.
An add-on feature to direct messaging on any platform.
The feature allows you to attach cash bounty to your direct message. The money is released to the recipient as soon as they reply, regardless of what they say. They get paid even if their reply consists of a single word..
The platform can opt to take a commission out of the bounty.
The higher your cash bounty, the higher your message is positioned in the recipient's inbox.
When adding the bounty, you get to find out what spot your message has. You can increase/decrease the bounty at any time until it gets a reply.
DM inboxes that work even for VIP people
A high-profile individual could opt to have 10 DMs shown - arranged by the highest bounty.
If they don't want the money, they could set it up so that everything goes to charities of their choice or fund cool projects.
Options available to recipients
The recipient gets to dismiss a message regardless of the bounty (without getting paid). The sender doesn't get to find out if this happens. The recipient should be under no obligation to acknowledge a message.
An unsolved problem with this option is the fact that such a sender could attach an astronomical bounty but still not know that their message is being purposefully ignored. They could keep upping the bounty in hopes of being acknowledged.