Business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation, Elon Musk said that Twitter would soon remove 1.5 billion inactive users. He said on Thursday that deletions would leave the “name space” of dormant accounts vacant.
Musk added that identifying the accounts that the company should delete was “obvious.” They had “no tweets” and “no log-in for years.”
At the time of writing, the company has not provided exact details on how it would tag accounts for deletion.
Elon Musk might be removing inactive accounts due to user complaints. They say inactive accounts have unique and desirable handles that people snagged during Twitter’s early days.
According to the Inquirer.net, Eliminating those accounts would let others put them to better use. Moreover, the recent move may allow Twitter to explore ways of earning money.
The social media network called 237.8 million users “monetizable daily active users.” In other words, Twitter shows advertisements to these active users.
Inactive Twitter users cannot see ads, so they do not generate advertising revenue for the company.
Also, they do not produce content and engagement. Removing them could be a practical budget-saving move by the company.
Removing inactive users focuses Twitter’s upcoming monetization methods on active users.
For example, Elon Musk said he would charge an $8 monthly subscription fee for multicolored verification icons: gold, grey, and blue.
The gold check marks are for companies, grey is for government officials and departments, and blue is for individuals.
The CEO said that people might have an additional logo that indicates they belong to a specific organization. Also, Twitter staff would manually authenticate accounts before activating user check marks.
Soon, Elon Musk may turn Twitter into a super app, a mobile application that offers numerous functions usually found in individual apps.
For example, Grab delivers food, hails cab rides, sells insurance, and books hotel reservations. Lastly, Musk said he might add monetization features to NSFW accounts.
Sources: Inquirer Net