Ain't Too Proud To Beg: A Temptations Song or Elon Musk's Battle Cry

After spending more than a king's ransom for Twitter, Elon has to find a way to monetize X. Not that Elon is on the bread line, but no matter who you are, $44 billion is a steep price for a hobby.


But Elon is cool enough to spin it in a way that doesn't make it look like he's begging for cash.

Remember when Elon bought Twitter last April and said, "We will defeat spam bots or die trying"? Well, even by his own admission, it hasn't happened yet.

But don't worry, he's got a new strategy, and X users get to help.

All you need to do is pay. Elon's Premium service isn't enough. Now he wants a monthly subscription for the privilege of admission to the X-Twitter show. See what I did there?

That's because he's too cool to say it's an attempt to get back some of that king's ransom. Let's face it, this latest dance move isn't about crushing bots. It's about giving X a much-needed cash boost. In case you weren't aware, the financially troubled company has been burning through its money like a bonfire at a fireworks show, and that's after Elon dropped 80% of his X workforce.

Don't worry, X users can help.

By the way, our billing information is a great way to help Elon attract more businesses to the platform (about 60% of U.S. advertisers terminated their business with X), so Elon isn't just looking for your subscription money; he's playing the long game.

The move is vaguely reminiscent of WeChat, the highly popular Chinese app that was a small fish in a big pond before it began collecting payment details in 2014.

In a conversation on Monday with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when asked how to decimate the pesky bots that promote hate speech on X, Elon mentioned his plan to charge. According to CBS report, Elon said, "We're actually going to come out with a lower tier pricing. We want it to just be a small amount of money. This is actually the only defense against vast armies of bots."

Rebranding Twitter was an important first step in Elon's long game. He feared that people just couldn't get around thinking of Twitter as a 140-character microblogging, bird-loving entity that wasn't a suitable platform for "serious" business.

Elon said in late July regarding the Twitter rebrand, "In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."

The shift to a subscription is more about getting your money (and billing info) than it is about bots. Let's face it, bots aren't an issue for most users unless you're a business trying to figure out who's real and who isn't.

So, are you willing to fork over the cash for the golden ticket to X? If so, Elon's got his hand out for your credit card now.

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