Musk said the current subscription service called X Premium – which costs $11 per month for iPhone users in the U.S. and £11 ($13) for users in the U.K. – could possibly be extended to all users to deter bot operators.
"We're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the system," said Musk. He pointed out that setting up bots currently costs only "a fraction of a penny," but raising the cost of account creation to "a few dollars or something" would act as a barrier and potentially require new payment methods for each bot created.
In April, when Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, he promised to get rid of the bot operators. "We will defeat the spam bots or die trying!" Musk had triumphantly tweeted back then. However, a year after acquiring the platform, the battle against spambots is still far from over.
And now, Musk came up with the idea of putting a paywall on X after the social media platform reported a 60 percent drop in its advertising revenue. The revenue, which was supposedly their primary source of income, dropped after an advertiser boycott after Musk's takeover. He was accused of not addressing the alleged rise in inappropriate and hateful content on the platform.
Monthly payment part of X's rebranding into "everything app"
The new agenda of Musk is similar to that of Tencent's WeChat – a super app that transformed the way people in China conduct daily transactions. WeChat collects its payment details from its users by virtually sending "hongbao" (red envelopes of cash) for Chinese New Year since January 2014.
Similarly, Musk aims to make users invest in the platform to both tackle the bot issue and transform X into a versatile global app that goes beyond traditional social media.
"The real objective behind this nationwide carnival was to make WeChat users link their apps to their bank accounts – a prerequisite to both sending and receiving the 'virtual red package' – and thus substantially strengthen Tencent's ability to charge WeChat users in the future," business professor Xiaoming Yang wrote in the Asian Case Research Journal, along with two other colleagues.
A few years later after WeChat began collecting payment details and users started linking their bank accounts, it became a super app. Thanks to half of the country's population who regularly use mobile payments, Tencent can now charge users for various services. (Related: Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as “X,” wants to turn it into an “everything app” similar to WeChat of China.)
In July, Musk started rebranding Twitter into "X," as part of his preparation for his long-envisioned goal of creating a global "everything app" that merges social networking, messaging, e-commerce, and peer-to-peer payments into a single, cohesive platform.
"Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," Musk announced in July along with Twitter's new "X" logo on the exterior of its San Francisco headquarters. Musk revealed that posts on the platform would no longer be referred to as "tweets" but as "X's."
In short, Musk wants something like WeChat, but something functional globally. Just like his ambition, WeChat seamlessly combines messaging, video calls, gaming, photo sharing, ride-hailing, food delivery, banking and shopping within a single app.
"If you're in China, you kind of live on WeChat," Musk commented. "It does everything – sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface. It's really an excellent app, and we don't have anything like that outside of China."
Visit ElonMuskWatch.com for more stories about the X app, formerly known as Twitter.
Watch ReAwaken America Tour founder Clay Clark dropping the truth bomb about the sinister agenda of Elon Musk on his Twitter 2.0, now known as X.
This video is from The Jeff Dornik Show channel on Brighteon.com.
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