During a live streamed event with Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk said he’s moving to charge all users of X a small fee to use the site, although whether X posts will still be free to read is unknown.
Musk has previously stated US advertising revenue was down 60%, which is one of the reasons why he hired NBC’s former advertising executive, and well known World Economic Forum acolyte Linda Yaccarino, but that move doesn’t appear to have restored confidence with advertisers, while Musk’s fight with the US ADL (Anti-Defamation League) over whether X is allowing too many antisemitic posts continues, even causing Netanyahu to urge Musk to tackle antisemitism and hate speech on the platform.
Netanyahu said: โI hope you find within the confines of the First Amendment, the ability to not only stop antisemitismโฆ but any collective hatred of a people.โ
Musk responded: โI am against antisemitism and against anything that promotes hatred and conflict,” while noting that given the hundreds of millions of posts on X, โsome of those are going to be badโ.
If Elon goes through with the plan – because not everything Elon says actually comes to pass, like his previous declaration to want to block the ability of users to block others – the expectation is that X would charge users a smaller fee than the current US $8 (from $13 in Australia, and from ยฃ9.60 in the UK), or “lower tier pricing” as he put it, although whether easting users would still be able to read posts free of charge is unclear – it would seem you’d need to pay to be able to use X at all.
In the interview with Netanyahu, Musk stated: “The single-most important reason we’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” while also adding the subscription fee would ensure each bots can’t register accounts without having a new credit card number registered each time a new account was created, thus massively reducing the number of fake accounts and bots.
Given X is reported to have over half a billion users, even with a unknown number of those fake accounts, even a dollar or two per subscriber per month could add up to hundreds of millions of dollars on a monthly basis, which is a lot more than the 700,000 users currently said to be paying for a blue tick on X, something that would only bring in less than US $6 million per month at the US $8 per month pricing.
X which had revenues of US $4.4 billion last year, but was only expected to post revenues of US $3 billion this year.
