Elon Musk secretly stymied Ukraine's counter-attack and the Pentagon press officers can't talk to the media without his permission, but despite more earned media than Donald Trump could dream of, he still can't get many people to pay for Twitter. The company has some 640,000 paid users in the recent estimates, and Elon Musk has only 40k customers ponying up to subscribe to his account.
While X does not disclose the number of total subscribers to the feature, or the number of subscribers that individual creators have amassed, data obtained by Fortune regarding Musk suggests that Subscriptions is not exactly catching fire among X's alleged 541 million users.
According to material viewed by Fortune, Musk (the most followed user on X with 155 million followers) has garnered just over 40,000 subscribers, or about 0.025% of his followers, who each pay $4 a month to get exclusive content from the tech multibillionaire. That equates to nearly $2 million annually, before Apple and X's cut. A source familiar with the matter said that several other high-profile creators have less than 5,000 paying subscribers on X, a relatively modest number compared with their large followings. … "I think Subscriptions in its current state are a bust," a source at X told Fortune.
The New York Times reportedly added 190k subscribers to the 9.6m it already has, in recent months.
The bottom line: right-wing textual social media was never profitable for the companies that tried to monetize it in the past (Gab, Parler, Truth Social), and Twitter, never a profit machine in the first place, became distinctly unprofitable when it went that way too under Musk. The crowd is loud but small—and they're not big donors.
