Elon Musk says that X, the social media platform formerly known as %Twitter, is planning to charge a monthly subscription fee to all users.
Musk, who bought X a year ago for $44 billion U.S., said during an interview that he is giving serious consideration to placing a paywall on the social media site and charging all users to access the platform.
“The single most important reason that we’re moving to having a small, monthly payment for use of the X system is it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” said Musk.
Musk didn’t elaborate further on the potential paywall or say how much the monthly charge would be. But such a move would be a big change at the social media company, which, until now, has relied almost entirely on advertising to generate revenue.
However, Musk has been moving fast and breaking things at the company previously called Twitter. In less than a year, he has fired thousands of employees and rebranded the company as X.
In the interview, Musk claimed that X now has 550 million monthly users. With that many users, a monthly subscription fee could generate a lot of additional revenue for the company.
Analysts warn though that a paywall could lead to a mass exodus of users from X and push them to %MetaPlatforms ($META) rival %Threads app.
Meta launched Threads in July of this year as a direct competitor to Twitter and it quickly achieved more than 100 million users.
However, the number of daily active users on Threads has since fallen to less than 10 million today.
X is a privately held company. Its stock does not trade on a public exchange.
Meta Platforms’ stock has increased 104% over the last 12 months and currently trades at $302.55 U.S. per share.