Elon Musk has indicated that X, formerly known as Twitter, is preparing to charge all users for accessing the platform.
The X owner said erecting a paywall around the business would ward off the bots, or automated accounts, that have become a bugbear for Musk.
Speaking in a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, the Tesla CEO and world’s richest person suggested that X was going to charge its user base. Currently, Twitter only charges users for its subscription service X Premium, which offers perks such as a verified account checkmark and costs $11 a month in the US for iPhones and £11 in the UK.
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He is. He’s your average internet troll that made a few lucky decisions in the past.
And don’t call me Shirley.
By “lucky decisions” do you mean “born into wealth”?
His best decision to date, yes.
What, you didn’t pick “Born to emerald mine magnate” at the character creator? It really is the only logical choice, you know.
I feel so dumb now!
Your username explained! ;-p
Edit: Odd to see an innocuous joke get downvoted. Was the wink not enough?
He was simply born rich.
Twitter gave regular people too much power. The rich moved to destroy that power.
Look, if Elon was trying to ruin Twitter, it would be flourishing right now.
His backers maybe wanted to destroy the brand and the service, and they chose the right guy for the job if so, but the only thing Elon does is seek praise and attention.
Not quite related to the conversation, but I think it would be funny if a CEO tried to run a business into the ground but ended up being the most successful and beloved CEO in the company’s history.
“I know, if I enact a 4 day workweek, nobody will have time to get anything done”
“Okay so that didn’t work… Maybe if I increase staffing, give everyone a raise, the overhead will eat into the company profits and nobody will want to invest!”
“Um… I’ll have the dev team drag their heels on product release! Nobody will want to buy our product if we release a month late. Heck, maybe if we wait until the devs say it’s ready we won’t release anything at all! This plan is sure to work!”
That certainly would be springtime for them.
This person gets the reference!
“If I give everyone unlimited sick days, then they’ll never show up to work!”
This needs to be in c/writingprompts
I’ve been convinced for at least a couple of months that this is exactly what he’s doing. Once having that realization, I felt it should actually have been really obvious the moment he decided to lay off huge chunks of the technical staff and was openly hostile to key software engineering folks who spoke out.
I think the same. The original goal was probably to fire most of the workers, change the politics to match theirs, and just sit back and let the profits roll in.
But that failed, so now they’re killing the platform off with an intent of using the lost investment as a massive tax write off.
He put in some, financed more, and got backers for the rest.
Some of his backers were involved with competing projects.
In addition, he and they will eventually be able to take a loss, which they can carry forward to reduce their future tax liability.
And while all that plays out, he gets to use it to empower fascism, which also will probably be used to make him more money via government contracts.
If ever the government tries to stop him, he can now claim free speech violations.
The fact everyone is oblivious to his intentions being running it into the ground as a tax write off astounds me. He didn’t want to buy it. He was forced. Make it lose billions and write it off.
Everything about whatever-it-is-called-now screams ‘tax write off’ gig. So many people calling him dumb but - from a distance, spite often resembles stupidity.
He paid over 11 billion in taxes last year. He paid 44 billion for Twitter. Pretty obvious he’s trying to tank it to off set his tax implications. He will report a giant loss every year. If he can do that for more than four years, it’s a technical profit.
you think? it’s been his goal from day one. he’s an attention seeker and not much else
Let me guess. Paying a subscription will not mean the end of ads.
I have been wondering for a while what he would have to do to finally crash twitter, I think this may be it.
It won’t be the end of bots either, it means less users overall, and conversations can be influenced with 100 bots rather than 100,000.
Small timers won’t pay that, but corporation, PACs, and the wealthy won’t flinch at that kind of advertising budget.
And now Musk gets paid for them, he’ll never mention bots again.
No, but it will be the end of his advertising revenue. Does that count?
Haha, no one is gonna pay to use social media. I don’t use Twitter but you would never get me to pay for absolute garbage brain rot. I’m already on lemmy for that and it’s free.
They want me to pay to be advertised at.
Lol.
to be advertised at & have nazi propaganda pushed on you.
Cable TV…
Its all going back that way isn’t it.
Don’t some people already pay a subscription fee to Twitter?
Yes, they are called idiots. It’s another idiot tax, like gambling.
The lottery is either a tax on stupidity or a tax on hope.
I don’t know which is more depressing.
Hope.
I think it’s one of his best ideas he’s ever had. I fully support this move and everyone else should as well.
What a wonderful, genius, innovative idea. Such brilliance. I think he should also keep ads on there as well.
The X owner said erecting a paywall around the business would ward off the bots, or automated accounts, that have become a bugbear for Musk.
Idiot manchild proudly breaks something he knows nothing about, complains when it doesn’t work as expected, news at eleven.
If all 330 MAUs paid this, Twitter would
netgross $3.6bn/month.Crucially, they absolutely will not.
Not only that, it’ll create a vicious cycle where engagement drops to the point where the people who still post on Twitter (politicians, reporters, celebrities, etc) no longer bother with it, thus leaving much less content for paying users, with the end game being that Twitter is the place where shithead tech bros and neo-Nazis talk to each other and pretty much nobody else.
Just as nature intended.
The movie about Twitter’s downfall will be absolutely fascinating.
Literally every single day we have idiots doing Musk’s PR work for free.
Downvote Musk spam. The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring his businesses stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
It’s really working against him at this point. A lot more people that were looking to buy his products and services aren’t anymore.
what is this clickbait bullshit??? I’ve seen multiple articles yet the wording is always ‘floated the idea’, but from the headline you could infer it’s an official announcement.
fuck modern ‘journalism’
Looks like Elon Musk and John Riccitiello are trying to see who can run their company into the ground the quickest.
Mastodon.World stock is increasing
Sadly people want their corporate daddy and Bluesky will get most of them
Twitter drama isn’t news anymore
When Elon realizes nobody wants to pay to listen to Elon, will he rollback the changes or start posting on Threads?
Well, if that doesn’t kill the site, I genuinely don’t know what will.
I’ve managed to stay away from Twitter while it was free.
Pretty sure I’ll manage when it’s blocked behind the paper curtain.
In fact, they’d have to pay me to join. And with all the new paying subscriptions they’ll have, maybe they’ll have enough.
