Elon Musk thinks he can double Twitter’s revenue through subscriptions alone

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

According to Musk, the new owner of the platform, it will earn $10 billion in revenue from subscriptions by the year's end, doubling the $5 billion it made last year.

Musk gave investors a taste of what to expect in his ownership in a pitch deck viewed by the Times. It is said that this will increase the number of followers on the social network to 159 million by the end of the century. The service gives users access to a button, ad-free articles, and other exclusive features. The number of users on the micro-messaging service is expected to grow from 217 million last year to 600 million in 25 years.

The pitch deck shows plans for a subscription service outside of Blue, which Musk expects to bring in nine million subscribers in 2023 and 104 million by 2028. Musk said earlier this week that governments and corporations would have to pay to use the social networking site. Revenue from it and Blue combined is supposed to reach $10 billion by the year 2028, making up a small portion of the $26.4 billion in total revenue Musk thinks the service will reach that year.

According to the Times, the rest of the company's revenue will be made up of ads, something that Musk predicts will bring in about $12 billion by the end of the century. Musk wants ads to make up just 45 percent of the total revenue of the company, which is why he said in a now- deleted message that it should remove ads for paid subscribers.

According to a report, Musk plans to make at least 15 million dollars from his payments business, which he expects to grow to over a billion dollars by the end of the decade. Users can tip creators, purchase Super Follows, as well as interact with limited shopping features that link users out to vendors. Musk is one of the co-founders of PayPal.

Really cannot stress enough that Twitter has virtually no data to license; tweets copyrights belong to users. Elon would have to radically change the terms of service to resell tweets and there are huge revshare and fair use issues to contend with https://t.co/shZiPUfkGH pic.twitter.com/2KPZeYkva3

— nilay patel (@reckless) May 6, 2022

According to The Times, Musk expects to make money through data licensing, a business that involves selling the millions of dailytweets on its platform to companies and developers that analyze the data for market insights or consumer trends. It's not clear how or if Musk plans to expand this business. The editor-in-chief of our paper points out that the terms of service of the company would have to be changed if they were to resell individual accounts.

Musk's plans to hire 3,600 additional employees are likely due to the fact that building out the services will take some work. According to The Times, Musk wants to have 11,072 employees by 2025, but the pitch deck shows that the number of employees will go up and then go down.