Musk plans to charge a monthly fee to use X, the old Twitter

2023-09-19 18:15:45

Elon Musk continues to implement changes and throw out ideas about the future of X, the old Twitter. And the latest one that he has launched could cause a real revolution for all users, without exception. With the aim of ending the number of ‘bots’ that reign on the social network, the billionaire is considering charging a monthly fee for all those users who want to continue using X. Specifically, he talks about “a small monthly payment” for user.

“It is the only way I can think of to combat large armies of robots,” said the also owner of Tesla during a meeting broadcast through the platform with the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. In Musk’s opinion, adding a subscription to each user of the social network would make it much more difficult for ‘bots’ to create new accounts by needing a different credit card to pay the fee.

It is worth remembering that it was in October of last year when Elon Musk took charge of the company after a bizarre purchase process that dragged on for months, and that almost ended up in court, after Musk’s complaints that the previous management did not provide the real information on fake accounts that were on the social network.

After threatening on several occasions to break the purchase agreement, it was on October 27 when Musk entered the Twitter headquarters for the first time as owner with a sink in his arms – which was interpreted as the revolution he was going to launch. -. And it only took five days to launch the first measure, very much in line with what he is now putting on the table to extend. He announced the launch of a premium subscription for all those who would like to have a verified account. The price is about eight dollars, so it is now estimated that the extended payment for all users will be a lower fee than what Twitter’s ‘selected’ users already pay.

But the measure, and the situation is not trivial, comes just two months after the owner of the company himself acknowledged in a tweet that the social network had lost almost half of its advertising revenue and continued with a negative cash flow. . It will be necessary to see if this new idea from Musk corresponds to his “more power to the people”, as summarized by the cleaning of bots on Twitter, or to a new way of reversing the budgets of the renamed X.