Musk says Twitter may charge a small fee for commercial, public users

May 3 (Reuters) – Elon Musk said Tuesday that Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) may charge a “small” fee for commercial and public users, part of the billionaire entrepreneur’s efforts to increase revenue behind major rivals such as Meta Platforms Inc. (FB.O) Facebook.

“Twitter will always be free for informal users, but perhaps a small cost for commercial / government users,”[ads1]; Musk said in a tweet. “Some income is better than none!” he added in another tweet.

Twitter declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

Last week, Reuters reported that Musk told banks he would develop new ways to monetize tweets and cut executive pay to cut the company’s costs on social media. read more

Musk also told the banks that he planned to develop features to increase business revenue, including new ways to monetize tweets that contain important information or go viral, sources told Reuters.

At the annual Met Gala in New York on Monday, Musk said that the reach of Twitter at the moment was just “niche”, and that he wanted a much larger percentage of the country to be on it. read more

Musk, also CEO of the largest electric car manufacturer Tesla Inc (TSLA.O), has been proposing a number of changes to Twitter since last month.

In tweets that were later deleted, Musk proposed changes to the Twitter Blue Premium subscription service, including cutting the price, banning advertising and giving the option to pay in the dogecoin cryptocurrency.

After signing the $ 44 billion deal to buy Twitter last week, Musk said he wanted to improve the platform with new features, make the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeat spam bots and authenticate all people. read more

Reporting by Shivani Tanna, Maria Ponnezhath and Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; editing by Uttaresh.V and Subhranshu Sahu

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