Elon Musk needs to obtain, from Twitter, the maximum profitability in the minimum time. This is not a surprise, we already talked about it in the middle of last year, months before the process of acquiring the social network by the (now a little less) billionaire was completed. The credits that he has had to request to carry out the operation are associated with significant interests that Musk is going to have to pay, when the social network continues to be financially deficient.
The accounts, in the end, have turned out to be much more important than freedom of expression, the space for public debate and all the string of plans and good intentions that Musk advanced that were part of his intentions to take control of Twitter. Suddenly he went from talking about freedom, freedom and more freedom (as, curiously, many liberticides tend to do) to start censoring journalists, to try to get money from under the rocks and to say that the possibility of bankruptcy is on the horizon. desk. Could it be that the Twitter accounts caught him by surprise, I imagine… (yes, indeed, it’s sarcasm).
The most notorious movement in this regard has, of course, been to start charging for the verified account, an element that until now was only granted to accounts of people and companies with a certain level of notoriety, to prove that they were indeed who they said they were (hence the verified name), going on to include it in Twitter Blue, the subscription modality of the social network, and which also increased in price as soon as it took control of Twitter.
Now, as we can read in The New York Times, Elon Musk is considering charging for certain Twitter usernames. As you may recall, some time ago he reported his plans to remove 1.5 billion inactive accounts, in order to make those usernames available to new users of the social network. At that time, there was simply talk of releasing names, not that they could have an economic cost for those who want to use them.
According to the sources cited by The New York Times, the option that is being evaluated is to auction those names that may be more interesting, and that therefore it is the users who put a price on them. Obviously, the vast majority of the 1,500 million that is intended to be recovered will have no value, but it is more than likely that some interesting identifiers can be found among them and, therefore, there are users willing to pay for them.
From the acquisition format, it can be deduced, yes, that Twitter plans a single charge for them, so at least we can find ourselves with a song in our teeth, since I bet that at some point, someone thought of it. the possibility of charging a monthly fee for them, thus generating a recurring income, which is precisely what the accounts of the social network need the most right now.
