"X" reportedly offers to sell some users discarded handles for as much as $50,000

“X” reportedly offers to sell some users discarded handles for as much as $50,000،

If Elon Musk had to start over, he might not have decided to spend $43 billion on Twitter because the social media platform, now known as “X,” has become a money pit. Oh, Musk has no shortage of big ideas for “X”, including turning it into a super app like China’s WeChat and allowing it to handle mobile payments, messaging, instant messaging and social media. Another recently discussed project would involve turning “X” into a dating app.

Musk is desperate to improve X’s cash flow

If you have the feeling that Musk is desperate to achieve positive cash flow from his purchase, you are correct. While some of the advertisers who left “X” en masse when it became clear that Elon had no real business plan have returned, Musk has sought sources to raise funds since he took over Twitter for the first time over a year ago. The verification check mess was always meant to raise money, and Musk recently launched “X Premium.”

The best Twitter/X account of all time belongs to Nothing CEO Carl Pei - "X" allegedly offered to sell discontinued handles to some users for up to $50,000

The Best Twitter/X Account Ever Belongs to Nothing CEO Carl Pei

Some of the features that “X Premium” subscribers enjoy are things that might have been free at another time. Posts can now contain up to 25,000 characters, up from 280. Paid subscribers have 60 minutes to edit a post which can also be formatted. Premium subscribers can also post videos up to 3 hours long and up to 8GB in size at 1080p. “X Premium” offers three levels of service:

Basic: $3 per month or $32 per year. Gets a little boost for responses.
Premium: $8 per month or $84 per year. Gets a big thumbs up for replies.
Premium+-$16 per month or $168 per year. Receives the greatest increase in responses.

The higher the tier you are subscribed to, the fewer ads you will see.

But Musk needs more money than the amount he can generate from selling these subscriptions. He needs money not only to help cover the debt he used to buy Twitter, but also to fund some of the changes he wants to make to “X.” In hopes of raising a ton of money, Musk plans to sell old Twitter handles according to Forbes. The latter obtained emails from a team within the company, known as the @Handle team, which has started working on a marketplace where old, discarded Twitter handles can be purchased.

While waiting for the marketplace to be built, “X” solicited potential buyers by email and, with a few handles, offered to sell the usage rights to the “X” platform for a lump sum of 50,000 $. Forbes promised not to publish the emails in order to keep their recipients anonymous.

This is the best Twitter/X account in history, at least in my opinion

The plan to sell used handles has been around for about a year. In November 2022, Musk posted on his social media site that a large number of handles had been taken over by bots and trolls and Musk said he would release them next month. One “X” user suggested a nickname marketplace where buyers and sellers could arrange to sell scrapped “X” and Twitter handles at an agreed price, with Musk’s company receiving a commission. Last January, The New York Times reported that Musk plans to release 1.5 billion handles.

In the “X” Help Center, under the title “Can I get an inactive username?” “, the response says: “Unfortunately, we cannot publish inactive usernames at this time. » This would seem to indicate that the handle market is still a work in progress. If you do not want your username “X” to be considered deleted, you must log in every 30 days. Although there are no plans to release unused credentials at this time, Musk has a habit of shouting “Fire, Shoot, Aim” so you never know what he might decide to do and when he will do it.

As far as this author is concerned, the best Twitter/X account is the one still used by Carl Pei of Nothing. Its handle? @getpeid.