I love that Elon wants to charge $1/year for Twitter, because of the petty satisfaction I will derive from not paying even that much
for hundreds of years the internet ran thus: free websites let you post, but showed you ads and sold your aggregated personal data to anyone who wanted it for any reason, while paid websites charged you directly and didn't show you ads. over time, this distinction became murkier, as the lines between paid software, subscription services, apps, and websites blurred, and the cash-starved venture capitalists huddled in the dark, asking questions like well what's 'personal data' anyway and what even is an 'ad'.
THEN THE GREAT DISRUPTOR, ELON MUSK, APPEARED, and spake:
what if we charged people AND made them look at shitty ads?
and the remaining shareholders rejoiced! and X, THE EVERYTHING APP, hatched from the ashes of twitter and achieved its final form: a wasteland of bots selling bot-generated crypto t-shirts and assorted scams to other bots, forever.