Elon Musk, the owner of X, suggested today that the social network formerly known as Twitter might no longer be a cost-free service. On Monday, during a live-streamed interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, Musk stated that the business was “moving to a small monthly payment” for the usage of the X system. He asserted that this modification would be required to address the bot problem on the site.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk. “Because a bot costs a fraction of a penny — call it a tenth of a penny — but even if it has to pay…a few dollars or something, the effective cost of bots is very high,” he said. Plus, every time a bot creator wanted to make another bot, they would need another new payment method.
Musk called the new subscription payment a “small amount of money,” although he did not specify how much it would cost.
Musk also provided updated X metrics during the conversation, claiming that the site now has 550 million monthly users who produce 100 to 200 million posts daily. It remained unclear, however, if Musk is including automated accounts in those figures, either good bots like news feeds or bad bots like spammers.
This number also prevented a direct comparison to the pre-Musk user base of Twitter, which was determined using a specific statistic the company had developed known as the “average monetizable daily active user,” or mDAU. This outdated measure showed which Twitter users may earn money by seeing its ads. Twitter had 229 million mDAUs at the time of its most recent quarterly report in 2022.
Musk did not expand on the plan to charge for X or the timing of such a move. However, since Musk took over the site last year, the business has pushed users to sign up for X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue), a paid subscription service. This subscription service, which costs $8 per month or $84 annually, offers a number of benefits including the opportunity to edit posts, half the amount of ads, prioritised rankings in searches and chats, the capacity to publish longer messages, and more.
Although X withholds the number of paid customers it has, third-party data shows that X Premium hasn’t drawn in the vast majority of X consumers. For instance, one investigation found that just 827,615 customers presently subscribe to X Premium.
For Musk, the notion of charging everyone for X is nothing new. In fact, Platformer revealed last year that Musk was considering the idea of placing a paywall on the entire Twitter platform.
Though hate speech on X came up, the main topic of conversation between Musk and Netanyahu today was AI technology and its regulation. In this statement, Musk asserted that he is “against antisemitism” and “anything that promotes hate and conflict.” Naturally, Musk’s most recent altercation saw him threaten to sue the Anti-Defamation League for defamation after the latter accused both X and Musk of having antisemitic views.