Musk floats several gimmicks to make Twitter profitable
Elon Musk’s strategy to make Twitter profitable as quickly as possible seems to be to turn Twitter into everything the platform is not, seemingly ignoring much of what made the platform profitable in the first place.
Instead of creating the town square where important public discourse is freely debated (which Musk claimed was his Twitter vision), he’s now making moves to potentially skew discussions by ranking unauthenticated accounts with freshly granted blue checks above others in feeds, not because they're users who have more informed or more popular points of view, but because they are just about anyone who paid $8 that month. His other big ideas to drive profits reportedly include charges to direct-message celebrity users and charges to see OnlyFans-like videos posted by paid, verified users. In weighing these ideas, Musk is seemingly ready to charge fees wherever he can and unafraid to throw up paywalls between users and the content that arguably initially drew them to Twitter.
According to The New York Times’ interviews with two people familiar with the matter and reviews of internal documents, Musk and his advisers have discussed all these strategies to monetize Twitter and dig the platform out of debt.
