Elon Musk has effectively destroyed Twitter — excuse me, X — since acquiring it a little less than a year ago. First the celebrities left in droves, all the extremists came back, and now the only people left are right-wing conservatives and bigots who love shouting at one another in their self-made echo chamber. Introducing paid tiers hasn’t generated much income — revenue is expected to be even less in 2023 than it was last year — and Musk is getting desperate. So, he’s apparently thinking of making the entire platform premium, meaning you’ll have to pay to use it at even the most basic level.
- Elon Musk says making people pay for Twitter will keep the bots out. Never mind the fact that they will no doubt find a way around his paywall — Musk believes that all the spam accounts will simply disappear once Twitter is entirely for paid users. Bots cost only a “fraction of a penny” to create, so if they had to pay more via separate accounts, the amount of spam content on the platform might lessen.
- So, how much is he charging? That hasn’t actually been announced yet. However, per The Guardian, Musk told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the company is “moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the system.” He later said “a few dollars or something” could be enough to do the trick.
- Musk has been inflating the numbers a bit. He claims that X has 550 million monthly users now that it’s using a different (and undisclosed) method to estimate user base. This time last year, that number stood at around 238 million. The math ain’t mathing, is it?
- He has to do something to generate income for the business. According to Elon Musk’s estimations, X has lost 60% of its advertising revenue because people hate that he’s heading up the company and are boycotting the site. Lest we forget, Musk is all about “free speech” — otherwise known as letting racists and incels run riot.
- Making Twitter or X a paid platform will likely finish it off. Even for users who have been on Twitter for more than a decade, the chances they’ll pay out on yet another subscription, especially for a site that offers basically nothing to its users, are slim to none. Threads may not have saved us, but there has to be a better way.
