Elon Musk proposes making X paid for all users

The X social network plans to charge a small monthly fee for usage, Elon Musk said in a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

LIVE: Speaking with @elonmusk about how we can harness the opportunities and mitigate the risks of AI for the good of civilization. https://t.co/XiAQwOXzcP

— Benjamin Netanyahu — בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) September 18, 2023

The change is expected to address the problem of a ‘huge army of bots’ on the platform.

“If you have to pay a fraction of a cent for a bot, or something like that, the effective cost of bots would become very high,” explained Musk.

The billionaire did not specify how much the new subscription would cost, but described it as ‘a small amount of money’.

The timing of the changes is also unknown.

During the conversation, Musk shared fresh metrics for X, noting that the site now has 550 million users per month, generating 100 to 200 million posts daily. It is unclear whether news feeds and spammers are included in this statistic.

The number of X Premium subscribers is not disclosed; however, according to some data, it stands at 827,615 users.

Earlier, Elon Musk’s previous initiative to rid X of bots via a paid subscription of $8 per month did not yield significant results. A dappGambl study showed that about 10% of followers of popular cryptocurrency-focused accounts remain fake.

According to data from the Dewey Square Group, since the arrival of the new CEO the network has been seeing a monthly exodus of users. In March, traffic on the network fell 7.7% year over year.