Elon Musk suggests X will charge “small monthly fee” for all users

Elon Musk said X is looking to charge users a “small monthly payment” to tackle bots on the social network.

X, previously known as Twitter, underwent a number of changes soon after Mr Musk, the multibillionaire owner of X Corp, bought it.

The platform is now “moving to having a small, monthly payment for use of the X system” to combat “vast armies of bots”, Mr Musk said during a livestreamed conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.

However, the Tesla and SpaceX boss did not reveal how much the new plan would cost X users or what additional features subscribers would get.

During the interaction with Mr Netanyahu, the Tesla titan said X currently has 550 million “monthly users” who generate 100-200 million posts per day, adding that the new change to include a “small amount of money” would be necessary to deal with the problem posed by bots.

It is unclear whether the multibillionaire’s figure of 550 million monthly users includes bots and also doesn’t allow comparison with the metric the company has used to estimate its user base, called the “average monetizable daily active users” or mDAUs.

But the Tesla chief said a subscription fee would make it more difficult for bots to create accounts as each bot would need a new credit card to register on the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Mr Musk said.