Social Media companies have been trying for years to figure out how to get consumers to pay for their service. The easy answer was get advertisers to pay with high costs and little ROI, therefore making the consumer the product; or offer a 50%+ discount on the premium service every time you cancel – devaluing the product.
The concern was that consumers wouldn’t pay for the service and they (the companies) couldn’t connect the world if it was a premium service.
I don’t know how many premium & plus subs X has, but I’d say Elon figured it out pretty quickly that consumers will pay for the product when it has value to them.
( He seems to have figured out AI too. ChatGPT just lied to me when I asked for an image for this post. And Gemini looks like an alpha of MidJourney.)
[ I put my post into Grok, Gemini and ChatGPT and asked it to create an image to represent my statement. Left to Right: Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT. ]