In a continued effort to make a dying platform profitable, Elon Musk unveiled two subscription tiers for X, formerly known as Twitter. At the same time, Musk continues his vendetta against news publishers by stripping The New York Times’ official account of its gold verification checkmark, as first spotted by the Washington Post reported Thursday.
“Two new tiers of X Premium subscriptions launching soon,” Musk tweeted early this morning. The lower-priced tier will have the same amount of ads but will allow users unfettered access to the platform while the more expensive option will feature no ads, the X owner says.
The news comes fresh off the heels of news that X began testing a $US1 subscription this week for new accounts in New Zealand and the Philippines. Musk claims the subscription tiers are an attempt to combat bots and spam on the app, but it’s also undoubtedly another stream of income for the platform, which has been hemorrhaging both users and advertisers since Musk took over last fall.
As for Musk and the New York Times, a spokesperson for the newspaper confirmed to Gizmodo via phone call that the outlet’s gold checkmark was removed on Tuesday. The spokesperson says the Times received no explanation from X on why the badge was removed—other media outlets such as Vox, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg have retained their gold checkmarks. In its place, a blue checkmark appeared on the Times’ X profile on Friday.
X did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment on the decision or the subscription tiers.
Musk has apparently had a beef with the New York Times, as the platform originally pulled the outlet’s blue checkmark in April after it refused to pay the exorbitant price for verification, as reported by Bloomberg. X also shadowbanned the Times in August when it was revealed that links to the outlet were throttled ever-so-slightly compared to other news websites. More broadly, however, Musk has been on a crusade against news outlets as a whole—X recently decapitated headlines on the platform, trusting users to manually enter accurate information into tweets themselves.