If Elon has his way, you'll have to pay just to use Twitter

Twitter, or X, is a more expensive place to be if you’re looking to get the full experience. Since Elon Musk took over the platform, the paid subscription service called Twitter Blue (now X Premium) rose from $3.99/month to $8/month at the least. Well, according to a new report, Elon could possibly make Twitter a fully paid platform.

Since Elon took over the platform, he’s been dead-set on making it profitable. The company was only really bringing in about $1 billion each year before the takeover, which was about breaking even. Elon wants to make the app a cash cow. Because of this, he’s been distributing just about every new feature to premium members and leaving free users in the dust.

Twitter might be a fully paid platform

Money is on Elon’s mind, but this move isn’t about the money, according to Elon himself. During an AI safety roundtable, Elon spoke about the issue with bot accounts on the platform. He’s been in a war with bot accounts from the get-go.

During the roundtable, he expressed an idea to make the platform completely paid. The thing about bot account creators is that they can create accounts en masse for free. Having a fee to create new accounts will discourage them from pumping out new accounts.

Not only will charging them help, but those willing to pay will have another issue. Each new account will need to use a different payment method. If you want to create 100 accounts, you’ll need to have 100 payment methods to create them. 

So, this move could combat the bots but, just like most of Elon’s changes, it could hurt the platform more than help it. People are upset with bot accounts, yes, but having to pay to use the platform would upset them even more.

One thing to note is that Elon didn’t outright say that he’s going to make the platform fully paid. It seems that he was mostly just throwing the idea out there. While most of Elon’s changes to the platform have been impulsive, we’re not sure that he’s going to randomly flip a switch and start charging people.

We’ll just have to wait and see what he plans on doing.