Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has suggested the possibility that X, the social media platform he acquired that was previously known as Twitter, could implement a paid subscription system for its users.
During a livestream alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk expressed concern about the growing presence of bots on the platform and how this could affect the quality of the platform and its use by users.
That is why Elon Musk has proposed that the introduction of a paywall, although it would be a “small amount”, is an effective measure to combat the proliferation of these bots, since the effective cost of operating them would increase, even if it were a minimum amount.
A paywall for X: definitely goodbye to the great social network that many knew.
Although Elon Musk has not given specific details about when this subscription system would be implemented or how much it would cost, this change in X’s policy will not go unpunished and comments against it are already a trend on the social network.
“We’re actually going to propose a lower tier price. We want it to be just a small amount of money,” says Elon Musk. “It’s a longer discussion, but really this is the only defense against robot armies.”
Some even speak of a tantrum on the part of the billionaire, who has seen how he has tried to boost his income through X Premium, which offers benefits such as editing posts and removing ads for a monthly fee, but has failed to attract a large portion of its user base, with only a limited number of subscribers.
“We continue to be cash flow negative, due to a ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus a large debt load,” Musk said in his July post. “We need to reach positive cash flow before we can afford anything else.”
