Did you know Elon Musk Explores Paid Sign-Ups, Premium Features, and Interface Changes to Revive X in 2025

 

Elon Musk seems to be on the edge of making sure 2025 is a successful one for X, unlike the disastrous financial losses incurred last year.

The company has yet to post the poor financial figures of the previous year but it’s on track to make sure the same mistakes don’t repeat and the app boosts revenue this time around. Some changes are major and could include charging new users for signing up to the platform.

Yes, new account creation will no longer be free and could cost $8. As per reports from Fortune, the plan would come into play next month. With the charge, users will get a month's worth of access to X Premium. The latter costs users $7 every month if they wish to get exclusive access and attain the verification badge or bluetick.

Other reports detailed more about how Musk explained to employees that this might be the only means to ensure the company gets more profits. The agenda in line seems to be a part of an extension plan on X that spanned several different regions two years back. This is where the platform charged users $1 to make profiles on this app. During that moment, X shared more about how it needed this to halt bots and not generate more revenue.

The sole focus seemed to restrict bot profile creation by making them more expensive and hence deter them from springing in masses all of a sudden. Now, this new refreshed version would drive revenue by attaining direct income sources and also raise X Premium intakes by marketing exclusive features.

For now, X Premium has failed to take off with the same enthusiasm that Elon Musk had once envisioned. His radical plans related to bringing down dependence on big dollars through ads. This would ensure less reliance was placed on advertiser demands and related moderation.

Musk predicted that revenue for such subscriptions would rise to greater than 50% of the overall cash inflow as more than 69M users would sign up to the app by this year’s start. Sadly, only 2M ended up doing that. Today, it’s still just deemed to be a marginal source of revenue generation.

The company also hoped its AI chatbot Grok could bring in more keenly interested users that were interested in getting a Premium upgrade but that again didn’t work out too well in Musk’s favor. Remember, arch-rivals like Meta are putting out their AI chatbot free of cost on their apps |Hence, the value that X might offer doesn’t appear lucrative.

In other news, Musk seems to be in favor of making user feeds on X less cluttered. The tech billionaire raised his voice about reducing unnecessary data as much as possible so that it’s simpler or more clean and content-focused.

The latest suggestions include getting rid of time markers from the main feed so what you end up with is something clearer featuring posts where users can scroll easily. Now, the main focus is the actual post.

This decision is quite similar to Musk’s choice of getting rid of function buttons and counters for engagement in-stream. At the end of the day, you get a more clean and neat user interface.

If you’re an iOS user, you enable this display by deactivating buttons for performance and engagement via settings. You can also switch the side-swiping features on for X for greater post interactions as compared to doing it all manually.