Elon Musk suggests charging governments and corporations a ‘slight cost’ to use Twitter

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter hasn’t been finalized but, however the world’s richest man is preserving busy by kicking round concepts for potential modifications to the platform. His newest suggestion? Charging firms and governments to tweet.

“Finally, the downfall of the Freemasons was gifting away their stonecutting companies for nothing,” tweeted Musk. “Twitter will at all times be free for informal customers, however perhaps a slight value for business/authorities customers.”

As is usually the case with Musk, there’s no dedication to this plan: the man’s simply tweetin’. However it does slot in with what we’ve beforehand heard about Musk’s concepts for the platform. Reuters reported final month that, when pitching banks on his acquisition, Musk recommended he may cost media firms to cite or embed tweets. In every case the logic is easy: Twitter is at present free, folks need the product, so why not cost for it?

Properly, as a result of these concepts appear apparent, however include lots of potential issues. Within the case of charging to both a) quote or b) embed tweets, a) can be counter to the primary modification (not an ideal look in case you’re selling free speech) whereas b) would introduce all kinds of administrative complications (difficult if Musk needs to cut back Twitter’s headcount). Mike Masnick of TechDirt has an ideal piece explaining these points right here.

By comparability, making governments and firms pay to tweet is extra simple, however nonetheless difficult to implement. For instance, how large does an organization must be earlier than you cost it to make use of Twitter? You most likely don’t need The Coca-Cola Firm to pay the identical fee as a neighborhood brewery, for instance. But when not, how do you differentiate? Do you scale expenses primarily based on variety of followers (which could not replicate an organization’s dimension), or income (which would want validation), or one thing else altogether? And the way a lot do you cost, even on a tiered system? Ask an excessive amount of and also you’ll push folks away — decreasing the community impact that offers social media a lot of its worth within the first place. Too little and it received’t make a distinction to your income. And so forth and so forth. These aren’t insoluble questions, however they’re not precisely easy, both.

At any fee, all that is imprecise hypothesis: we simply don’t know what Musk plans to do with Twitter at this level. However this in itself is informative, as enjoying issues by ear is outwardly the modus operandi of the world’s richest man. A current New York Instances piece explored how Musk tends to disdain organized enterprise plans when operating his firms in favor of working on intuition (and you’ll’t say he’s not been profitable up to now). Tweeting out concepts for modifications to Twitter is simply par for the course: let’s see the place it goes subsequent.