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.
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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.
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 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.
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you think? it’s been his goal from day one. he’s an attention seeker and not much else
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.
Don’t some people already pay a subscription fee to Twitter?
Yes, they are called idiots. It’s another idiot tax, like gambling.
The lottery is either a tax on stupidity or a tax on hope.
I don’t know which is more depressing.
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I’m convinced he’s ruining Twitter on purpose. He’s still pissed he was forced into buying 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.
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Not a chance he is going to get the value up to $44B.
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I am finding it pretty easy to say, personally.
Torching the brand goodwill alone is a mistake that a 2nd year MBA student would mock you for.
Well, for the sake of context let’s note that we are two people talking about it on Lemmy, for free, with no corporations involved.
Whatever is next for Musk, I think if centralised social media needs to turn a profit then it’s probably not going to remain a central fixture of online society forever.
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’
The movie about Twitter’s downfall will be absolutely fascinating.
InternetHistorian is hopefully on the case!
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.
Looks like Elon Musk and John Riccitiello are trying to see who can run their company into the ground the quickest.
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.
Mastodon.World stock is increasing
Sadly people want their corporate daddy and Bluesky will get most of them
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!
Oh hell yeah
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Would be cool if he did. One last flurry of articles about Twitter folding and then nothing. That would be great.
