Elon Musk is squeezing money from Twitter. Each user will pay

Billionaire Elon Musk is once again pushing users away from X/Twitter with relentless determination. The billionaire’s latest idea is further fees, this time for every user without exception.

Elon Musk wants paid X/Twitter

The Twitter owner revealed the idea during a live stream with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bogacz argued that X currently has a “terribly difficult problem” with “huge armies of bots.”

Musk surprised viewers by revealing that “the platform is preparing to introduce a small monthly fee for access to System X.” This would mean Twitter going completely behind the paywall. “This is the only way I see to fight bots,” emphasizes the world’s richest man.

The billionaire also stated that X.com currently has about 550 million users who use the platform at least once a month. Mashable’s May estimates show that approximately 640-680 thousand people pay for the Premium X (formerly Twitter Blue) subscription.

How to fight bots on the Internet? Musk has a point

Although it seems that squeezing more money from users is the worst possible move at the moment, on paper Elon Musk’s idea even makes a bit of sense.

He says that currently the cost of setting up one bot is about 1/10 of a cent, so by spending just a few dollars spammers can organize a huge army. This makes this tool popular and quite effective. If each bot had to be connected to a separate credit card and pay a small monthly amount, mass spamming companies and users would simply no longer be profitable.

We currently encounter a similar problem of unwanted messages, spam and even fraud in e-mails. Already in the early years of the Internet, the idea appeared to pay for each message sent – as if we were sticking a “postage stamp” on a virtual letter. However, the idea never caught on.