Billionaire also says platform has 550 million monthly users generating up to 200m posts a day

Elon Musk has indicated that X, formerly known as Twitter, is preparing to charge all users for accessing the platform.

The X owner said erecting a paywall around the business would ward off the bots, or automated accounts, that have become a bugbear for Musk.

Speaking in a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, the Tesla CEO and world’s richest person suggested that X was going to charge its user base. Currently, Twitter only charges users for its subscription service X Premium, which offers perks such as a verified account checkmark and costs $11 a month in the US for iPhones and £11 in the UK.

  • Nougat
    2•1 year ago

    Right up front here, Musk is an absolute idiot, and wrong about almost everything. I am not defending him as a person, and I am not defending his specific plan here to have people pay monthly for their account.

    However – charging a small one-time fee for an actual account with the ability to post is a legitimate avenue to reduce bots. SomethingAwful forums have done this for a long time: an SA account is $10. Doing something like that (maybe not as high as $10), and grandfathering in existing accounts - that could work, because the main thrust would be using the fee as a bot-blocker.

    Musk, however, just wants the money, and he’s hiding that behind the idea of preventing bots with it.

    • Uprise42
      2•1 year ago

      I’d pay for social media. But not from any of the current giants.

      These websites cost a lot to run. They make that money via ads and selling your info. If a new social media came along with a month subscription, no ads, and protected my data then I’d be fine with it. I don’t trust Twitter to do that though. I’d see them collecting the monthly fee, still giving me ads and still selling my data.

    • @eek2121
      2•1 year ago

      It doesn’t work at scale.

      $1, $10, or even $100 is nothing to me or possibly you, but to someone else that is grocery money, and most of us won’t pay a dime just out of principle.

      I pay around $50/mo to my favorite sites for content. I wouldn’t give Twitter a dime. If this gets the few stragglers off Twitter and onto mastodon I am all for it.

    • originalucifer
      1•1 year ago

      you dont charge your product to exist. its clear elon doesnt understand what he purchased