Elon Musk proposed that X, previously known as Twitter, might no longer offer free access.
In a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Musk announced that the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for using the platform, at around 34:40 timestamp.
He indicated that this change was deemed necessary to address the issue of bots on the platform.
Musk provided clarification, stating that it’s the sole approach he can think of to counteract the proliferation of bots, given that the cost of operating a bot is minimal, possibly as low as a tenth of a cent. Nonetheless, even if bots were mandated to pay a few dollars or any amount, the genuine cost of deploying bots would rise considerably, according to TechCrunch.
Additionally, he pointed out that bot creators would need a new payment method each time they wanted to create another bot.
Although Musk did not specify the exact cost of the new subscription fee, he described it as a “small amount of money.”
During the conversation, Musk also revealed new statistics for X, reporting that the platform now boasts 550 million monthly users who generate between 100 and 200 million daily posts. However, it remained unclear whether Musk included automated accounts, such as beneficial bots like news feeds or detrimental bots like spammers, in these figures.
Musk did not provide further details about his plan to introduce charges for X or when such a change might occur. Nonetheless, since Musk assumed control of the platform the previous year, the company has been encouraging users to subscribe to its paid offering, X Premium (formerly known as Twitter Blue).
Notably, Musk had contemplated the notion of placing all of Twitter behind a paywall, as previously reported by Platformer last year.
