They say working in the media industry doesn’t pay well, well jokes on you suckers. I’m rich now. Elon Musk just gave me $25 for using his social media platform.
X (formerly Twitter) may be struggling to bring in advertising revenue and turn a profit, but the company apparently has a stockpile of cash to share with its users. And, as it turns out, the bar for who qualifies to get a piece of this pie is amazingly low.
There are several factors to be on Musk’s payroll, but the most major ones are: Be subscribed to X Pro (formerly Twitter Blue), maintain at least 500 active followers or more, have posted in the past 30 days, and have at least 15 million organic impressions on your cumulative posts within the last 3 months. The kicker here is that the requirement used to be 15 million impressions, a bar my measly account didn’t reach. The company changed it to 5 million, and when I saw that, I immediately seized the opportunity and signed up to be a creator.
Honestly, I never planned to sign up for X Pro to begin with. Initially, the subscription seemed to only offer a handful of supplementary perks and not having a premium account didn’t impede my job—until it did. X Corp. put the ability to message users who don’t follow you behind the paywall, an inconvenient twist for me, as this is precisely how I contact many of my sources.
I begrudgingly signed up (and expensed the eight bucks to Fortune), then messaged at least 100 X Corp. employees to get started. Cold outreach is not a glamorous task, but it's one of the best ways to reach new sources, and get your audience insight into Elon's hardcore world.
It was only a week ago that I signed up for the creator program. I was on vacation at the time and all the hours spent at the beach inadvertently reduced how much I tweeted to nearly zero. It’s not exactly clear how far X Corp. goes back in your tweet history when deciding what to pay you, but I certainly haven’t had a hit tweet in awhile. I’d say the last time I went viral was when I tweeted my scoop in June on X’s head of trust and safety internal Slack account getting deactivated (732K impressions), and my other scoop shortly after that one about Salesforce luring employees back into the office with $10 a day to local charities (563.1K impressions).
Other than that, my tweets have been pretty sparse (I had to count, at the time of writing, about 35 tweets excluding replies in the month of August which may sound like a lot but for me, that’s infrequent). I asked about love spells from Etsy wishes (2,800 impressions), my airline losing my suitcase in Switzerland (105.3k impressions), and my exasperation of prices in Zurich (23k impressions). I can afford Switzerland now though, thanks Elon.
In short, I have no idea why the company would give me $25. The company doesn’t explain it, but one employee did say users can expect to see these checks every 2 weeks.
Friday appears to have been one of those paydays. As I pondered my unexpected windfall, I discovered the company that I was now among by reading the tweets of other recipients of Musk’s largesse. Jason Calacanis, the angel investor, boasted about receiving $2907. Former hardcore X employee Esther Crawford claimed to be $712 richer, and former X engineer Halli Þorleifsson (whomst Musk once belittled publicly) posted a payout of $25, despite him getting roughly 30 to 60 million impressions a month, by his own estimation.
As far as I can tell, this will go straight to your bank account so long as you set up a Stripe account. These payments were doled out on a Friday, so I can only expect to see the money hit my account on Monday.
As a journalist who covers X and Musk, I wasn’t expecting to come into any kind of significant sums of money by participating in this program. The plan was just to see how it works. So I’ll disconnect the creator feature now and consult with my editor as to whether I should give the $25 to charity or buy myself an overpriced sandwich and soda.
