New Revenue Stream for X? Forbes Exposes: X has established an account name trading market, with an account priced at $50,000.

Forbes reported that Twitter, now under X, is developing an internal marketplace where interested buyers can spend $50,000 to purchase abandoned or bot accounts that are no longer in use, aligning with suggestions previously made to X by users. Musk had previously stated that around 1.5 billion usernames are expected to be released.

Is X Launching an Account Name Trading Market?

According to an email obtained by Forbes, the internal @Handle Team at X company has begun selling long-unused account names and has established an account name trading platform for this purpose. X is sending emails to potential buyers, informing them of this opportunity and explaining that the purchase can be made for a fixed fee of $50,000.

Forbes notes that the email comes from active employees at X and, to protect the anonymity of recipients, the full content cannot be disclosed.

Although X's own account policy does not allow users to privately trade usernames, X seems to have been planning this for over a year, with Musk previously announcing that he would "release free" 150 million usernames and delete less frequently used inactive accounts through the "inactive account policy":

We recommend X users to log in at least once every 30 days to prevent their accounts from being permanently deleted.

It is worth mentioning that under Musk's previous poll regarding "whether to liberate suspended accounts that did not violate the terms of use," someone had already suggested the concept of an account trading market:

X can create a Handle Market, similar to eBay, where people can buy and sell accounts. Sellers can set their own sale price or leave it to the market for auction, with the highest bidder winning. X will take a certain percentage fee upon sale, releasing account control and generating revenue.

Currently, it seems that this proposal has been noticed within X.

Is Selling Account Names Really Beneficial?

Techcrunch previously speculated that X's move is seen as a way to increase the company's revenue. Selling at the aforementioned prices, without considering the sales rate and price differences of each account, could generate approximately $7.5 billion in profit.

However, this figure seems to pale in comparison to the $13 billion debt Musk initially borrowed from seven major banks, including U.S. banks, Morgan Stanley, and Barclays, for the acquisition of Twitter.

Furthermore, previous reports revealed that many major advertisers have stopped advertising on X, leading to a significant decrease in revenue, reducing X's initial valuation of $44 billion during the acquisition to only $19 billion. Therefore, finding alternative revenue streams is imperative for X.

Just yesterday, Musk announced the launch of his proprietary AI application "Grok" based on X's platform, which not only has a lower monthly fee than GPT4 Plus but also can candidly answer sharp questions, track the latest information for updates, and X's subscribers can even use all the latest features of the product for free.

xAI, an imitation of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Grok is officially launched, with humor, satire, and the latest current events.