Elon Musk: X could charge users ‘small’ monthly subscription fee

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of X (formerly known as Twitter), says users may soon have to pay for access to the platform.

Musk spoke on Monday during a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister.

The billionaire said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of X. 

According to Musk, such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

“We’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the system,” Musk said.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots. Because a bot costs a fraction of a penny — call it a tenth of a penny — but even if it has to pay a few dollars or something, the effective cost of bots is very high.”

Musk said the firm will “come up with a lower tier pricing. So we just want it to be just a small amount of money”.

“This is a longer discussion, but in my view, this is actually the only defence against vast armies of bots,” he said. 

Musk however did not give a timeframe for the implementation of the subscription plan.

The Tesla founder said X now has 550 million monthly users who generate 100 to 200 million posts daily. 

Since the tech billionaire took over the micro-blogging platform, several features have been introduced to improve the service.

Last week, Musk said an audio and video call feature will soon be added to X.

He said the feature will be compatible with Android, iOS, PC, and Mac, adding that once released, the feature would allow audio and video calls to be made without a phone number.

In 2022, the firm came up with a subscription package for the verified blue tick mark.

In April 2023, Musk introduced a feature that allows media publishers to charge users per article.

This followed the announcement that Twitter users would be able to monetise their content, including long-form text and hours-long videos.