Elon Musk has nearly 25,000 people paying him $4 a month for 'this and that'

Twitter's owner Elon Musk has shifted gears from discussing Twitter's legacy blue checkmark fiasco to promoting his social media platform's revised Creator Subscription Program.

The social media platform calls the new feature "Subscriptions" and enables creators to opt in to subscribing directly to a specific creator in return for exclusive access to bonus content, exclusive previews, tweets, subscriber-only Twitter Spaces, and other perks. Essentially, Subscriptions are very similar to Only Fans, or Patreon, in the sense that fans are able to directly support their favorite creators in return for exclusive content, features, experiences, etc.

To promote Twitter's new way to support creators on its platform, Twitter owner Elon Musk took to his personal Twitter account with a screenshot of his account UI. The screenshot showed he is following 240 accounts, has 136.4 million followers, and has 24,700 paying subscribers. Navigating to Musk's subscription option on his account, it can be seen that he charges $4 for exclusive access to "this and that". A calculation of 24,700 x $4 gives us an approximate figure on how much Musk is making from his Twitter subscribers, which is just shy of $100,000 per month at $98,800/month.

• Read more: Hundreds of 24-ton bricks set to solve a major problem with renewable energy

If all of Musk's subscribers remain the same for the entire year, that would be just under $1.2 million a year. It should be noted that Musk's subscriber count is likely to grow as the Twitter owner only enabled subscriptions to his account on April 15. Furthermore, if you think you can replicate Musk's account, you should know that Musk is the most followed account on Twitter, and being the owner of the platform as well, puts him in the realm of an anomaly account. Meaning it's highly unlikely that any other Twitter account will be able to generate as much revenue from Twitter Subscriptions as Elon Musk.

• Read more: Watch SpaceX's Starship launch and explode in 8K slow motion

At the moment, if you take Musk's 136.4 million followers and divide them by the amount that are paying for Subscriptions, you would get around 0.018%. This figure is the percentage of people that are following Musk and have chosen to pay for exclusive content, a seemingly very small fraction of the Twitter CEO's followers.

So, why is Twitter focusing its marketing efforts on Subscriptions? The platform is attempting to steer away from advertisers to new streams of revenue such as Twitter Blue and now Subscriptions. Musk has been making this change since he took over the company in October 2021, which was followed by many major advertisers either suspending advertising expenditure on Twitter or stopping it completely. Essentially, Twitter has been hemorrhaging money, and to keep the company afloat, Musk has reduced running costs via layoffs and is creating new streams of revenue.

• Read more: NASA's Mars rover snapped an incredible photo of a dusty Mars helicopter