Musk reformulates Twitter: he will charge 11 dollars in the Apple store and free 1,500 million accounts

Elon Musk frees up space in his new house.

After the massive layoffs at Twitter (and the subsequent scaring away of some of the employees who kept their position), the platform will expropriate 1.5 billion existing accounts, the company's new owner and CEO has announced.

These are "obvious deletions of accounts that have not had tweets or records for years," the businessman has advanced, who with this decision reaffirms his position in the hasty negotiation carried out to buy the technology company:

as count users who remained inactive or were directly bots.

In its latest results, from the second quarter of this year, Twitter had 237.8 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU), the measure used by the company to quantify its true loyal base, excluding accounts that have no use. or actual identity.

Twitter thus improved the figures of a year earlier by 16%.

Last April, still in a tug of war in the negotiations with Musk, Twitter came to recognize that it had been overestimating its community by up to 2 million people: at the end of last year, it declared 216.6 million when in fact it stayed at 214.7 million.

Even so, the purchase has been consummated for around 44,000 million dollars.

In the most recent months, the company would have continued to increase its community to even exceed 250 million users, according to at least what it has stated to its advertisers and some North American media such as The Verge have collected.

However,

with which Twitter tries to combine its main source of income, that of advertising, with a subscription system that is preparing its relaunch after a chaotic first entry into force.

Twitter's subscription model, which should definitely be operational in the coming days, would cost

from Apple's iOS app store.

It is expected that, in addition to the blue category, there will be a gray one for institutional accounts and a gold one for platform advertisers.

With that price difference advanced by

, Musk tries to offset the commissions that the iPhone company pockets when a consumer pays and downloads an application in the App Store.

"The Apple store is like having

. Definitely not right," Musk published last May, thus adding to the criticism of PayPal (a company that the South African co-founded).

Last week, Musk continued in that line, denouncing that Apple had "threatened to remove Twitter from its Apple Store" without giving them explanations, an attitude that could even lead him to launch a phone of his own that would rival the iPhone.

Just a couple of days later

, CEO of Apple, who received him at his headquarters in Cupertino to supposedly smooth things over.

The South African had also warned that Apple had withdrawn its advertising from Twitter, but after the meeting he assured that those ads were back, although it seems that there will be no transfers to the App Store.

Among the friction points is also the debate on freedom of expression that Musk wants to take almost to its final consequences, an absence of filtering in the comments that in no way fits with Apple's policies.

The Twitter subscription system began at the beginning of November, at $7.99 per month and available only in the Apple store (and therefore without any consideration for its commissions), but there was no choice but to pause the new service. as a result of the proliferation of accounts that impersonated other people's identities (to the point that the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly suffered a sharp fall on the stock market due to the announcement that a verified user made on their behalf: that insulin was becoming free) .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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