Elon Musk's X (Twitter) will no longer be free and will charge users a monthly fee. Musk announced this decision during a live broadcast on Monday, alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The reason behind transitioning the platform to a paid model is to address the issue of bots.

Musk emphasized the necessity of collecting a small monthly fee from users to combat bots effectively. He pointed out that the cost of bots is quite low, with the expense of running a bot being as little as one-tenth of a cent. Therefore, he argued that implementing a dedicated payment method is crucial to tackling the bot problem. Additionally, Musk mentioned that bot creators would need to make a separate payment when creating new bots.

Musk has not disclosed the exact amount of the new subscription fee yet but described it as "a small amount of money." The X Premium subscription service offers users features such as post editing, prioritized rankings in searches, and enhanced messaging capabilities for a monthly fee of $8. The company has been encouraging users to subscribe to this paid service since its acquisition of X last year.

There hasn't been an official announcement regarding the number of X Premium users so far, but independent analyses estimate that approximately 827,615 users have subscribed to X Premium. The impact of this new decision on whether users will prefer to pay for X, switch to X Premium, or completely abandon the platform will become clearer in the coming days.