Billionaire also says platform has 550 million monthly users generating up to 200m posts a day

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.

  • pigup@lemmy.world
    214·
    1 year ago

    My theory is that someone has unflattering evidence of him on Epstein Island and other such things. I think those evil mob forces have him by the balls and they want Twitter killed subtly since the left organizes there and other countries have organized revolutions against authority there. So his job is to kill it and make it look like he just fumbled it. I think the only thing he regrets is whatever it is he did that gave people the power to blackmail him.

    • pqdinfo@lemmy.world
      11·
      1 year ago

      While I’m OK with entertaining the proposition he’s also probably a pedophile given his obsession with calling other people that (albeit if he was a practicing one I’d have expected a victim to have spoken out by now, whether he visited Epstein’s island or not), the whole buy out happened very publicly and was very much in keeping with the instability and narcissism we’re increasingly aware he represents.

      • He made an offer to buy Twitter and accepted a contract that was very one sided. Doesn’t anyone else’s advice, thinks he can “fix” anything. Largely “hate bought” Twitter, his offer came after months of insulting Twitter’s management and accusing them of various frauds (projection, stupidity, pointless fighting, etc)
      • He realized this was a terrible idea after the fact and tried to wiggle out of it.
      • He continued insulting Twitter’s management attempting to justify pulling out and managed to break the only terms in the contract that would have allowed him to get out of it because it contained what was essentially a non-disparagement clause. Had he not broken that he could have simply said he was unable to find funding (true or not) and paid a $1B break-up fee.
      • Eventually, reluctantly, the buy out went through because he left himself no options.

      Basically the Musk we had started to realize existed when he lied about CaHSR and proposed a bad-faith vaporware “technology” as a replacement, when he accused a hero of being a pedophile for stating the obvious about his “help”, when he became estranged from his daughter because he couldn’t accept her having gender dysphoria, when he kept repeating the same claim about the readiness of self driving technology over the space of half a decade, screwed up in exactly the way we’d expect him to.

      He didn’t need to be blackmailed. This is who he is.