Elon Musk's X Begins Paid Rollout In Multiple Countries

Would you pay just to have the ability to tweet?

You will eventually have to as Elon Musk's X platform has started rolling out its' paid subscription tier that will charge all users an annual fee in order to simply tweet, reply and like posts as well as quote other accounts.

Users that do not pay the fee will still be allowed to view posts but won't be able to interact with them. That's pretty much the equivalent of staring into a toy store window but not being able to ever go inside and actually interact with them. What fun is that?!

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?

The social media company announced that the initial paid rollout is set to begin in the Philippines and New Zealand before eventually making its way here to the United States. Currently, the fee is $1 a year but X says that it will vary depending on which country you are located in. The move comes just one month after Musk hinted at doing so, which at the time I wrote was a terrible move.

Musk has argued time and time again that he believes the only way to limit the influx of bots on the platform would be to charge the fee, which he says should "sufficiently deter" people from creating them because it will now cost them additional money. Previous analysis show that around 11% of all of X users are actually bots but they contribute to nearly 20% of all the content that is seen. However, fewer than 5% of paid 'X Premium (Previously Twitter Blue) accounts are bots - so in theory, paying to tweet should cut back the spam.

" will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. Within this test, existing users are not affected," X said in a statement on Tuesday.

WILL PEOPLE PAY?

The big question is of course, whether having to pay to tweet will actually force more users to leave the platform.

If there's one thing about humans it's that they love free things and hate paying for something that they could once get for nothing. You mean we have to sign up for another thing with our email account? People hate doing that.

Honestly, if the price does stay at $1 when the subscription tier comes to America, I think the majority of people would pay the $1 to stay on the platform. But if it goes up in price I think X takes a substantial hit - I mean just look at the miniscule amount that pay for the X Premium (Twitter Blue) service. Of over 500 million accounts (bots or not), less than 500,000 were X Premium users according to data analysis done just a few months ago.

Elon Musk finds himself in an ultimately difficult decision. He substantially overpaid for Twitter when he purchased it at $44 billion. He then fired a ton of his backend engineers and his staff while also making many controversial moves including the Twitter Blue subscription service, view limits on tweets and even changing the company's name to "X" for some ungodly reason.

But the one thing he has going for him is that X still runs the day. People want their second-by-second live reactions and news fix. And the platform is the only one to still allow that. Others like Mark Zuckerberg's Threads have tried but failed miserably. So for now, Musk is still king... but at what cost?