Elon Musk bets big on content creators, hints X will pay higher than YouTube

Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, who previously admitted that X “underpays” content creators, hinted on Wednesday that the social media platform is considering increasing payouts to compete with YouTube.

Responding to a tweet calling for higher pay for creators, Musk tagged X’s product manager Nikita Bier and said directly: “Okay, let’s do it, but let’s not strictly enforce no gaming on the system.”

Bier responded immediately, telling Musk that X was “involved.”

Addressing the second part of Musk’s proposal, Bier added, “We have a new method that will eliminate 99% of fraud.”

Musk’s tweet drew an enthusiastic response from independent journalist Nick Shirley, who recently made headlines after exposing daycare fraud in Minnesota.

“Yes, that would be great, so far X has not been able to compete with YouTube Adsense, but it is a much more effective platform for videos to be shared and seen by the masses without censorship,” said Shirley.

“I’ve been telling my friends for months to post on X, but they haven’t made the effort because their time is better used (monetarily) on other platforms,” he added.

Many other netizens also joined the conversation, with many hailing it as a “real game changer.”

Users argued that, with major language models (LLMs) consuming most of the material on the internet, the only platforms with credible content would be those that paid creators well.

Musk’s comment endorsing higher pay for creators comes at a time when digital platforms are competing to protect original, human-made and authorized content under an onslaught of AI-generated material.

This also comes months after the Tesla chief said X needed to increase payments to creators to compete with platforms like YouTube.

What did Musk say before?

Earlier this year, in October, Musk pointed out that X had underpaid its creators.

Commenting on a tweet from Bier, saying that payments to creators do “more harm than good,” Musk corrected the product lead: “No, the problem is that we’re underpaying and not allocating payment accurately enough.”

The X chief also directly compared the social media platform’s model to that of Google-owned YouTube, bluntly saying “YouTube does a much better job.”

The creator monetization program at

However, despite introducing a payment system for creators, Musk’s platform has been criticized by many for a variety of issues such as inconsistent earnings, delayed payouts, and unclear monetization metrics.

In addition to addressing the issues faced by content creators, the