Is it a Hot Take That I Agree We Should Have To Pay For Twitter?

“This website is free”

This comment is usually found when you witness a great reply to a post, Chamath getting roasted, or a great meme on Twitter (X). The entertainment makes users say “how is this free?”.

Well it may not be for much longer.

According to Axios, “Elon Musk said Monday he's moving to require all users to pay a monthly fee to use his social media site X, previously called Twitter.”

Now, this fee will probably be minuscule and not affect many people. The groups who it will affect are the massive armies of bots that currently swarm the platform. These armies are degrading the user experience and likely are the #1 complaint I have heard from current Twitter/X users.

Charging a small monthly fee will cause a massive headache for the bot farms running thousands of accounts on the platform. This push will hopefully help improve the user experience for millions of people at just a small cost.

The only issue is going to be getting hundreds of millions of users to enter their card information and actually go through with the payment.

Look I am a fan of a move fast and break things model. If Elon has credible data that says this will improve the user experience 10x, why not try? If it backfires, go back to the drawing board.

Want to bet on if it happens?

Well, today I learned you actually may be able to. A new startup called Kalshi allows you to wager on the outcome of pretty much anything. The climate, government, weather, markets, everything.

While looking around in their discord, someone recommended adding if twitter will start charging users. So, you may actually be able to wager on it.

Kalshi on it’s own is an extremely interesting startup. First and foremost, people love betting/gambling and the action is only going to pick up more.

One important note is that Kalshi is not a gambling platform, it is a trading platform regulated by the commodities exchange. The way you “wager” is by purchasing contracts on the particular events.

Moving on, from my perspective people in their 20’s have a history over the past few years of gambling and investing. Through cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the legalization of sports betting in a few states, more and more people have been getting into putting money on the action.

While sports books around the world are spending millions in marketing, people often don’t realize that they sometimes do offer lines on stuff like the outcome of the Oscars. Yet, no one is advertising this.

That is where Kalshi is positioned to capture market share.

No one is pushing forward the marketing message of betting/trading on real word events and scenarios, only sports and stocks. If they position themselves right and continue to add markets that are compelling and will grab attention, there is significant opportunity to grab meaningful market share.

On a side note, I think AI implementation for Kalshi could be really cool. If you gather trending data from social networks you will be able to make new markets as they are trending. For example, if there is a sudden uptrend in the amount of people talking about the Colorado football team, you could build a market around how many total views their games will bring in this year. There are many other scenarios like this, but this is the first one that came to mind.