Elon Musk Proposes New Twitter Feature: Micropayments To Read News Articles

Posted on Thursday, May 4, 2023 by Chris Hayner

Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever

This just in from the far overworked section of the Chaos Lever news desk that covers Elon’s Bad Ideas: Now he thinks that Twitter can be a news-hosting aggregator that will entice people to buy access to articles on a per-click basis. Let’s see if we can hit them all in one quick go:

1. Elon has Consistently and needlessly antagonized news outlets to the point that they’re using Twitter less, and in some cases not at all anymore
2. Elon has fired most of his engineering staff so it’s unlikely that this feature would even be feasible, let alone stable
3. Elon has apparently no idea that the micropayment model of news consumption has been tried over and over again, and nobody has been able to really make it work
4. Elon has forgotten that people don’t go to Twitter to read the articles. Studies going back as far as 2016 consistently show that less than 40% of people EVER click the articles whether they retweet them or not- they just react to the headlines.

Engadget had reached out to Twitter for clarification of the business model and technical capabilities of enacting this by May, but of course you remember that Twitter doesn’t have a press team anymore. All emails to the previously working addresses return an auto-reply poop emoji. Because Elonnnnnnnn’s hilarious.