X to Go Fully Paid, Musk Says It’s the Only Way to Fight Bots
After a long list of changes to Twitter, essentially stripping away its entire name, there was a period of silence regarding what the platform would offer next. Well, it seems as though you’ll have to pay to use the platform altogether, as apparently, that’s the ultimate solution to combat the bots on the internet.
During a round table talk with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman, and physicist Max Tegmark, Musk allegedly stated his intention to transform X into a platform that everyone would need to p̲a̲y̲ ̲t̲o̲ ̲a̲c̲c̲e̲s̲s̲.
It is being reported that the price for this would be lower than the X Premium, which currently sits at $8/month. The reason behind this – on the surface, is said to be an attempt to combat the “vast bot armies” on the platform.
The single most important reason that we’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is that it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.
Because a bot costs a fraction of a penny, or a tenth of a penny, but if somebody even has to pay a few dollars or something, some minor amount, the effective cost of bots is very high, and then you also have to get a new payment method every time you have a new bot.”
Elon Musk via Social Media Today
While this will admittedly drive away a lot of genuine users from the platform, it’ll also result in better revenue generation. Right now, only 137 million monthly X users are active on the app. If all of them started paying for the service, it could help make up for revenue losses, which is a lot more than the current 700,000 X Premium subscribers, which account for 0.3% of the total users.
Take this news with a grain of salt since Elon Musk hasn’t said for sure that X will become completely pay-to-use. Instead, he might be looking for ways to get more people to sign up for X Premium, like maybe offering a cheaper option.
This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.
