Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is to charge all users subscription fees
theguardian.com
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.
He's so bad at running Twitter I'm starting to think it's his goal to ruin the brand. Don't know what for but surely he can't be this dumb?
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.
Didn't wanna spend 5 hours at the char creation screen so I just clicked "randomise".
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.
Anyone paying attention would notice this Pattern, they will be trying to fuck over the fediverse as well. Unfiltered social media gives the poors too much opportunity to revolt
Will be trying? Have you already forgotten Threads?
Threads happened so soon after the fediverse spun up it was like a contingency plan put into motion
I mean, Threads was federated with Mastadon, which has been going for quite a few years now. Threads was more of a response to Musk's takeover of Twitter, I think, trying to catch the Twitter users who had migrated to Mastadon.
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
Why couldn’t he be? There is ample evidence that, yes, he is this dumb and he’d had less press/more handling before. Remember, there was a different story about him. News outlets love their stories. The story was Musk = quiet, nerdy genius billionaire that was gonna save the world and Zuckerberg and Bezos were the quintessential villains in the press. Now that Zuckerberg rebranded with “Meta” and 2016 is in the distant past now, we hear much less about him and Bezos got a huge sympathy injection by getting divorced (and, I’m not even sure I’m remembering this properly, but the last thing I heard about him was his divorce and his ex wife getting half of everything).
Around this time, the pandemic hit and musk became the richest man alive, the really dumb shit he was saying and doing was more visible (and embraced by the right) and boom. All credibility was gone, all the stories from Paypal and SpaceX about his childishness and need to be corralled became common knowledge, and his story changed. The media had a new story, a new target, and it was a profitable one. Put the microscope on him and he kept fucking up. Then he kept doing douchey shit, bought twitter, and from there the dumpster fire of this really public failing became the flash point to display his stupidity.
My point is, he’s always been his dumb, given all the current evidence. It just wasn’t the story for a while. Now it is. So it seems like a new quality.
I haven't heard much about Bezos since he sent Shatner to space and then was a total dick and cut him off during his post flight interview.
His ex, on the other hand, has been taking her half of the divorce settlement and giving hundreds of millions to good causes.
Best thing that man ever did was divorce her.
Excuse me, I think today's Amazon package has arrived.
Yeah, that’s what I’m sayin. There was a time when Bezos was the richest man, he was achieving complete ubiquity and there was serious talk from people being so sick of him and his bullshit that there was anti-Amazon, anti-whole foods talks.
He fades into the background, people guiltlessly keep ordering from Amazon, shopping at Whole Foods, and Bezos keeps raking in the money. I mean, shit, I literally just read an article about Whole Foods fighting to keep BLM pins/hats out of their stores (on employees, that is) using the ANTI-GAY CAKE/WEBSITE ruling and…crickets.
It’s not just the news that loves their stories, we people do as well. They keep things nice and tidy for us, letting us know exactly what to be upset about and what to let go. Keeps capitalism working nicely (as, I’m sure, a fringe benefit).
I am still not ordering anything from Amazon. We do exist. Dozens of us even.
He was quieter before. If you look back to the beginnings of his Twitter account you can watch him develop an addiction, and he got more obnoxious as he craved the dopamine and developed a platform. That doesn’t mean he was super smart before but there wasn’t much of a place where he was speaking to the public outside of the media, and in those stories the Howard Hughes dreamer genius style was common. When people are quiet you tend not to think about them much otherwise. If he had stayed off of twitter the opinions about him would likely continue to be pretty positive.
People do talk about Zuckerberg, it’s just in relation to fighting Musk or about Threads. Facebook is increasingly irrelevant to young people and Instagram has never had the same level of controversy. What are people going to say about him that hasn’t been said? It doesn’t mean they don’t still think it and now think he’s some good guy.
Same for Bezos. His space stuff is what people talk about now and make fun of him for because he stepped down from most Amazon stuff in 2021. He’s always been quiet otherwise, what was talked about mostly was the crappy work culture he created at Amazon and the villainy was driving out local businesses. You might think people think Amazon is a great company now, but my experience is that people still aren’t super fans it is just a matter of selection, price, and convenience. People don’t suddenly think he’s a good guy.
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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.
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.
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.
I was just thinking the same. How much is too much before Hanlon's razor becomes dull?
His intention isn't to run Twitter, it's to transform Twitter into something else and hope that he can drag enough of the old userbase with him.
Fir example, it has been suggested he might be turning it into a "totalitarian social credit app".
Did you honestly just link to the Epoch Times? Calling it trash would be too complimentary.
In this case, what they're reporting on has been suggested by Musk himself on more than one occassion. It's basically been his lifelong dream to create a one stop shop X app, similar to WeChat in China. That's what he was aiming for back in the Paypal days.
I think this is really merely the latest in a continued assault against Twitter and free mainstream social media. They tried to make their own services that directly competed (eg Parler), they failed, so now they've bought Twitter with a leveraged buyout. Either Twitter becomes what they want it to be, and they invest further to cover the $13bn debt, or Twitter dies from the debt (which would not have existed without the buyout). With the current value of Twitter being estimated at less than this debt, the latter seems much more likely now.
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.
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.
Anyone following GME knows exactly why he is doing it.
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?
I'm convinced he's ruining Twitter on purpose. He's still pissed he was forced into buying it.
I like the theory that he's killing it to prevent us peons from organizing politically.
It'll only work if you kill Facebook, c'mon Elon I don't think you have the balls
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.
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.
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.
Idiot manchild proudly breaks something he knows nothing about, complains when it doesn't work as expected, news at eleven.
Over on Mastodon: brace for impact!
I'll stick with lemmy and kbin. Mastodon sucks.
I have to say it didn't work for me, Calckey is much better but I may just not be a microblogging person as I prefer it over here.
Looking up Calckey now.
But I like Kbin because it combines a reddit clone with a Twitter clone for each sub.
Calckey recently rebranded to firefish.social
I migrated my mastodon account - it's much better in every way. (no offense intended to Mastodon)
Yes, I haven't tried kbin as I've been happy on Lemmy. It would not surprise me if Lemmy introduced a feature to follow people that would open it up more to the Fediverse.
@sentient_loom #kbin for the win!
@MicroWave @Emperor
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'
It's an interesting thought, but he misses the #1 problem with online subscriptions- sign-up friction.
If you could just push a button and instantly be charged something, an awful lot of people would do it.
But when you go from $0 to $0.01, you will lose 99% of people, because most people can't be bothered to fill out a form, put in their credit card number, etc. Even if the amount of money involved is absurdly small, it's not the price, it's the friction.
Now if he integrates the app with Apple Pay or Google Wallet that will help, a little. But only a little.
PayPal? Venmo? Just as ubiquitous and already part of his vertical integration.
Assuming the cost is stupid low like a $1/year, low enough that almost nobody will think 'is this really worth it?'-- every required click or tap after hitting 'subscribe now' costs you 25-50% of the people who are still there.
Make it 1 penny for a lifetime subscription. Just having to thumbprint for Google Pay will still cost you 25-50% of the people who hit subscribe. Make it a credit card form with card/exp/cvv/address/tel# and your purchase rate is down to maybe 1% of the people who hit subscribe.
The movie about Twitter's downfall will be absolutely fascinating.
you spelled hilarious wrong
InternetHistorian is hopefully on the case!
Well, if that doesn’t kill the site, I genuinely don’t know what will.
It'll be the final nail. Traffic to the site will plummet because the vast majority of users will not want to pay and search engines like Google will no longer be able to index links to tweets, which of course will drive away the remaining advertisers. This is another disastrous move in a relentless string of bad moves by big brain musk. I have to admit that it really starts to look like he's doing this on purpose. Anyone with more than 2 brain cells should see this coming, even an idiot like musk.
You're putting a lot of faith in the idea that the guy's brain isn't prokaryotic.
Oh boy, now I get to pay to give Elon my dumb thoughts. Sign me right the fuck up!
I think it's bigger news that that fuck is meeting with that other fuck Netanyahu. What the fuck business do those two fascist scum have with each other?
Asking the real questions here.
Looks like Elon Musk and John Riccitiello are trying to see who can run their company into the ground the quickest.
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.
It’s surprising that in all these years, nobody came up with this innovation to make Twitter more profitable but in just a short time period, Musk was able to figure it out. Goes to show why he’s the richest man in the world!
Yep, this is the final nail in the coffin. Most people will just stop. Good job boosting the Mastodon community, Moron Musk.
Honestly, my hot take is that Mastodon is already better than X. Less toxic, more feature rich, more flexible, and built to be decentralized.
Would be cool if he did. One last flurry of articles about Twitter folding and then nothing. That would be great.
Mastodon.World stock is increasing
Sadly people want their corporate daddy and Bluesky will get most of them
Oh hell yeah
ngl I totally support this decision
When Elon realizes nobody wants to pay to listen to Elon, will he rollback the changes or start posting on Threads?
Well muskrat, you'd have to pay me to go back on Twitter so good luck with that.
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.
Long live mastodon. And bluesky too, when they finally open up and stop with the invite codes.
We all know he's too big of a pussy to actually do this. Stupid claim just to stay in the media
Yeah, this claim falls under "I'll believe it when I see it." I've never used Twitter in my life, couldn't care less if it dies, but this would truly just be suiciding the site. Musk is a megalomaniac, I can't see him just straight giving up his platform.
Elon is an idiot who fcked around and found out with all his Twitter shenanigans, I enjoy watching him make a fool out of himself infront of the whole world now.
That's a great idea! Can't wait for the end of biweekly news about how Twitter is changing, since it will die immediately.
Do it. Mastodon will be ready.
You gonna catch this one, Mozilla?
I hope that this really starts to be the downfall of Twitter/X.
But knowing how loyal Musk’s fanbase can be, I have a feeling many will be happy to pay.
I never thought there was any point to using Twitter in the first place, but now really, why would anyone stay on there?
Legacy audiences for entertainers?
I knew he was going to run Twitter into the ground, but I'm impressed at the speed and efficiency of it.
Who gives a shit
He needs revenue and this is a high risk, medium reward way to get it if he sees no end in sight on the advertising front.
And it's not like there's no way to make a subscription model work online, the NYT is doing it well. Lots of substacks and patreons are doing it.
But it's essentially launching a new company, with all the risk that entails. Subscription model flatly does not work with the network effects necessary for Twitter.
A Twitter where everyone has to pay, will not be worth paying for.
Right up front here, Musk is an absolute idiot, and wrong about almost everything. I am not defending him as a person, and I am not defending his specific plan here to have people pay monthly for their account.
However -- charging a small one-time fee for an actual account with the ability to post is a legitimate avenue to reduce bots. SomethingAwful forums have done this for a long time: an SA account is $10. Doing something like that (maybe not as high as $10), and grandfathering in existing accounts - that could work, because the main thrust would be using the fee as a bot-blocker.
Musk, however, just wants the money, and he's hiding that behind the idea of preventing bots with it.
I’d pay for social media. But not from any of the current giants.
These websites cost a lot to run. They make that money via ads and selling your info. If a new social media came along with a month subscription, no ads, and protected my data then I’d be fine with it. I don’t trust Twitter to do that though. I’d see them collecting the monthly fee, still giving me ads and still selling my data.
It doesn’t work at scale.
$1, $10, or even $100 is nothing to me or possibly you, but to someone else that is grocery money, and most of us won’t pay a dime just out of principle.
I pay around $50/mo to my favorite sites for content. I wouldn’t give Twitter a dime. If this gets the few stragglers off Twitter and onto mastodon I am all for it.
you dont charge your product to exist. its clear elon doesnt understand what he purchased
Fine by me. Accelerates the process of putting that dumpster fire out of its misery.
Do it. The titans must die before the internet can blossom once more.
DEITY$ help anyone I know that starts paying for Twitter. I was ridicule them mercilessly.
Poor Elon, the man is probably losing sleep over twitter, or x, or whatever the fuck he wants to call this far-right nazi sympathizing website
I am a hundred percent certain you could seriously damage twitter by seeing of the sprinklers(assuming they ate still installed) because there's no way musk's penny pinching didn't lead him to sell or not set up the special non conductive fire retardant
You're assuming the sprinklers are hooked to anything in the first place.
But really, that would have been handled long before he bought Twitter
That's why I was talking about him selling it off but he did migrate some servers so I doubt they have any fancy fire setup
LoL
$11 for iPhones. L M A O