I Think I Know the Real Reason Elon Musk Wants to Charge X Users $1 a Year

Four days before Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter was accepted, he made a solemn vow. “If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!” Musk tweeted on April 21, 2022.

One of Musk’s chief complaints about Twitter—which became something of a motif in his campaign to buy the company—was that it was overrun by spammers, scammers, and bot armies. Musk pledged to “authenticate all real humans” and clean up this inorganic activity.

While Musk has previously claimed dramatic progress on the anti-bot crusade—that he’s eliminated 90 percent of “scams and spam”—cybersecurity firms told the Wall Street Journal in June that there’s been effectively no change to the amount of fake activity on the platform since Musk took control. That may be because Musk’s sole strategy for cleaning Twitter’s mean streets of all those cyborgs has revolved around one simple but woefully flawed premise: Bots don’t pay.

This Musk refrain returned to the news on Tuesday when Fortune reported that X, formerly Twitter, may begin charging new users $1 per year for the privilege of tweeting or retweeting. X confirmed that it is testing this policy, crudely named “Not a Bot,” for users in New Zealand and the Philippines to start. “Read for free, but $1/year to write. It’s the only way to fight bots without blocking real users,” Musk tweeted. “This won’t stop bots completely, but it will be 1000X harder to manipulate the platform.”

While charging a $1 annual fee may discourage the laziest bot-makers, it surely won’t prevent anyone with a real incentive—financial, political, or otherwise—to manipulate the platform for their own personal gain.

The “Not a Bot” program, in other words, is a terrible way to fight spam—and there are good reasons to doubt Musk is serious about that goal, anyway. Rather, it’s a great way to do something else entirely: Get people used to paying X.

Musk first floated the idea of charging users to tweet on Sept. 19 in an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Musk told Netanyahu that bots are so cheap to set up that even adding a charge for “a few dollars” would do wonders to curb the bot problem.

And sure, X’s policy change may deter some malicious actors—but it will likely deter loads more users who simply will not pay to post on X, a site that has been free to use since it was started in 2006. Musk will almost certainly scare off users and, in that process, lose money because X is still largely an advertising-supported venture that needs free content and a high user count.

This isn’t the first time Musk has claimed that payments will thwart the bots: He originally insisted that the $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscription, which simply requires a phone number to receive verification, would deter malicious actors. It’s not just the charge, he’s said, but also the inconvenience. Malicious state actors, he once said, may have the money but “they don’t have a million credit cards and they don’t have a million phones.” (Musk may be drastically underestimating the capabilities of malicious state actors.)

Musk also floated limiting the number of direct messages users can send if they’re not paying subscribers, and paying to DM people who don’t follow you—both of which he has said were spam-prevention measures.

That’s all a distraction: Musk has made the platform much more ripe for manipulation and abuse  by removing verified blue checkmarks from legitimate accounts and letting people pay $8 to look important or famous; by removing headlines from weblinks so people have to click through a link to find out what it’s saying; by laying off content moderators responsible for making the platform a trustworthy place; and by setting up a pay-for-play system whereby paying users get the most reach on the platform. It’s a reality that’s especially stark amid the outbreak of war in Israel and the Gaza Strip, which has been noticeably hard to follow on a platform that once thrived during breaking-news situations.

By making new users cough up a buck to effectively use X, Musk is doing little to address the supposed bot problem. But he’s doing everything to get a subset of users to take out their wallets and pay for something—anything at all—on X.

Ultimately Musk doesn’t want X to be solely a social media platform, riddled with pesky bots that can manipulate a conversation. No, he wants to build “X, the everything app.”

In China, WeChat reigns supreme. The app is a daily conduit not only for social networking and messaging, but for food delivery, online shopping, and peer-to-peer payments. You can do almost anything with WeChat. When what you do involves payment, WeChat gets a cut.

Musk’s grandest ambition is to transform Twitter, a flagging social-media app that he overpaid for, into something akin to WeChat. But if he wants to build his own super-app, he’s going to need to get people—at the very minimum—comfortable paying for things on Twitter.

When Twitter’s pre-Musk management launched Twitter Blue—the app’s subscription service that Musk renamed X Premium—the main selling point was extra features. For a few bucks per month, devotees could pay to customize their app interface, undo recently sent tweets, and even edit tweets.

Under Musk’s ownership, the subscription, which he’s emphasized above all other business models, has certainly added new features—users can post lengthy screeds and upload film-length videos. But part of the sell is that without that $8 checkmark, Twitter is just worse. Your posts are less visible, your replies are buried, and services like TweetDeck are no longer free.

Musk has commodified the bedrock on which Twitter stands; the rest of the platform feels like rubble.

X’s new $1-a-year idea is more of the same, a cheap attempt to extort hangers-around into coughing up pennies, valuable credit card information, and important information about whether they’ll sign up on desktop or through Apple or Google’s mobile-app marketplace. We don’t really know how many users are staying or leaving Twitter under Musk, but it’s true that a lot of us have remained there, and not fled to competitors like Threads or Bluesky or just thrown our laptops into the ocean, out of habit. Musk’s vision of an everything app will require some different user habits—mainly, paying for stuff. But even spending a buck a year could be a psychic barrier for users: Not only is that first payment the hardest, but plenty of X’s users fundamentally dislike Musk and will not trust him with their payment information.

There is, certainly, a world in which breaking up advertising-subsidized social media could be beneficial. Musk is right that moving toward consumer revenue will empower users and disempower those pesky advertisers he despises. But Musk’s vision of a paid product resembles payola—something utterly extortionary.

That vision looks hazy. The reason Musk is unlikely to build the next WeChat is that no American company can really build the next WeChat with Apple and Google around. The two companies take about 30 percent of all in-app mobile transactions for subscriptions to apps like X. In China, developers build on WeChat; in the U.S., they build on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

Whatever the barriers, it appears Musk will keep trying to make his own WeChat—or at the very least, a platform in which he’s far from the only one who emptied his wallet to be there.