Use of X may no longer be free: Musk suggests mandatory subscription

Elon Musk says X, formerly Twitter, will eventually switch to a mandatory “small monthly payment” for using the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to fight large armies of bots,” Musk said a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If each account had to pay a few dollars, the costs for bot makers would quickly become too high, according to Musk. He did not elaborate on the exact amount or when such a mandatory subscription would be introduced.

Musk went on to say that X currently has 550 million monthly users, who post between 100 and 200 million posts every day. But it is not clear whether he also counts bots among these numbers of accounts. In the first quarter of 2022, Twitter still had 229 million monthly active users.

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Since last year, write and edit posts after publication. X Premium costs 9.68 euros per month in the Netherlands. According to one estimate, X currently only has about 800,000 subscribers.

The meeting with Netanyahu followed criticism from civil rights groups over Musk’s policies, which allegedly led to a rise in hatred and intolerance on the platform. In the conversation, Musk said he was “against anti-Semitism” and against “anything that promotes hatred and conflict.”

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