When Elon Musk took the helm of Twitter last October, I wrote that his real motivation for doing so was not to promote free speech or combat bots or whatever he was saying at the time. Instead, I pointed to the team he had assembled and to his early startup days to say that, for Musk, Twitter offered a vehicle to realize his longtime dream of wresting the business of payments from the banks.
On Tuesday, additional support for the Musk-wants-Twitter-for-payments theory came along: My colleague Kylie Robison published a scoop that X, as it is now known, is preparing to charge users $1 a year to use basic features like tweeting (sorry, "posting" in Musk speak). The CEO's official explanation is that it's part of his longstanding plan to reduce bots, which ironically have become far worse under his tenure.
