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.
His intention isn’t to run Twitter, it’s to transform Twitter into something else and hope that he can drag enough of the old userbase with him.
Fir example, it has been suggested he might be turning it into a "totalitarian social credit app".
Did you honestly just link to the Epoch Times? Calling it trash would be too complimentary.
In this case, what they’re reporting on has been suggested by Musk himself on more than one occassion. It’s basically been his lifelong dream to create a one stop shop X app, similar to WeChat in China. That’s what he was aiming for back in the Paypal days.
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Oh indeed, crypto will be in their so Musk and co can grift the gullible but it seems to be heading towards being an “everything app”.
That said, the subscription seems to go against these ends (as you’d want the maximum audience) but it does have the effect of making it more difficult for outside observers to monitor what a dystopian hellscape he has built there.
I think this is really merely the latest in a continued assault against Twitter and free mainstream social media. They tried to make their own services that directly competed (eg Parler), they failed, so now they’ve bought Twitter with a leveraged buyout. Either Twitter becomes what they want it to be, and they invest further to cover the $13bn debt, or Twitter dies from the debt (which would not have existed without the buyout). With the current value of Twitter being estimated at less than this debt, the latter seems much more likely now.