Why Elon Musk Wants All Users To Pay For X

Musk had on Monday, September 18 discussed his plans for X during a livestreamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Marvin Chege Marvin Chege
Sep 19, 2023 - 12:32 Updated: Sep 19, 2023 - 12:34
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Why Elon Musk Wants All Users To Pay For X
Graphic of Elon Musk and X's logo. /FILE

American billionaire and Executive Chairman of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk, is proposing to impose a paywall on the entire social media platform, meaning that all users will soon have to pay to access it.

Musk had on Monday, September 18 discussed his plans for X during a livestreamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Among other things, Musk revealed that the social network is “moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system” in order to combat “vast armies of bots" as those bots would need a credit card to register on the social platform.

A person logged into X (formerly Twitter). /BBC

The move, Musk further argued, would maintain the authenticity of the platform as well as the connections, with X now having 550 million “monthly users,” who generate 100 million to 200 million posts per day.

Musk did not however reveal how much users would pay on a monthly basis for using X, nor did he disclose how many of the company’s monthly users are authentic, versus bots.

He also did not make an apples-to-apples comparison with metrics previously used by Twitter. In May 2022, before Musk’s takeover, Twitter reported that it had “average monetizable daily active usage” of 229 million.

During the conversation, Musk also revealed plans to introduce a lower tier pricing than the current Ksh1,176 fee it charges subscribers to access its premium Blue service.

"We're actually going to come up with a lower tier pricing. So we just want it to be just a small amount of money," he stated.

"This is a longer discussion, but in my view, this is actually the only defence against vast armies of bots."

Musk has long stated that his solution for getting rid of bots and fake accounts on the social media platform is charging for verification.

Since taking over Twitter in 2022, he has looked to incentivise users to pay for an enhanced service, which is now called X Premium. This has been done by giving paid subscribers more features, like longer posts and increased visibility on the platform, even though users can currently still use X for free.

Although there is a clear financial interest for the company to charge users, Musk insisted that getting people to pay for the service is aimed at tackling bots.

"A bot costs a fraction of a penny" to make, he revealed. "But if somebody even has to pay a few dollars or something, some minor amount, the effective cost to bots is very high".

The risk Musk however faces with putting the whole of X behind a paywall is that it may lose a large chunk of its users. That in turn, could drive down advertising revenue, which currently accounts for the vast majority of the company's income.

Furthermore, Musk runs the risk of being overpowered by rival social media giants such as Meta by Mark Zuckerberg, which introduced Threads viewed as Twitter's biggest competitor.

Since purchasing the platform for Ksh6.4 trillion (44 billion US dollars), Musk has introduced a raft of changes, most of which have been controversial, including imposing reading limits on X users and abolishing the power of users to block other users on the platform.

His move to monetize X by paying users who subscribed to X Premium has led to an upsurge of outrageous posts aimed at amassing engagements translating to money, a tactic known as rage farming.

A person using their phone. /BBC