X will soon charge users ‘a small monthly payment’: Musk

Elon Musk is going to charge a “small monthly payment’ from all X users and the social media platform would not be a free place anymore soon.

In a live-streamed interaction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the X owner floated the idea that the social network may no longer be a free site, in a bid to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Musk said late on Monday,18 September. 

“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,” the billionaire added. 

The idea of charging everyone on X is not a new idea as last year, Musk had floated it for the first time.

The company currently charges $8 per month from its X Premium users, that gives them an ability to edit posts, see less ads, write longer posts and prioritised rankings in search and conversations.

During the interaction, Musk said that X now now 550 million monthly users, generating 100-200 million posts every day. 

Musk did not disclose how many paid subscribers it currently has.

During its last public earnings in Q1 2022, Twitter had mentioned 229 million mDAUs (monetizable daily active user).