Did Elon Musk just admit X underpays creators? Tesla boss slams his own company, compares it to YouTube
Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly said Thursday that microblogging platform X is underpaying its creators and praised Google-owned YouTube for its monetization plan.
Responding to an exchange between
The answer came in a Sept. 30 thread from X’s chief product officer, Bier: “Next week, I’ll be rolling out some minor upgrades for power users. Most of these were quick fixes that somehow got overlooked. Stay tuned.”
There were more than 500 comments on Bier’s post, with many pointing out shortcomings in X’s payments.
“…please fix monetization. I constantly compared my payments to my colleagues and was consistently underpaid. Happy to provide data,” wrote user Peter Duan, while another user shared a photo of the dashboard that tracks payments and asked for a similar feature.
As Bier’s post garnered more and more backlash, many of them issues with monetization, X manager responded: “At this point, I think payments to creators are doing more harm than good and we need to move to a different system.”
More than two weeks after this exchange, the topic appeared to have caught Musk’s attention; Musk publicly criticized X for underpaying content creators and praised YouTube.
‘Content drift’, ‘anti-India’ bias
However, Musk’s comment on Bier’s post opened up a whole new can of worms, with users pointing out problems with X’s algorithm and how it supports user-generated content. Some even supported Bier’s claim that the program did more harm than good.
“It’s true that Nikita isn’t true. There’s incentive accounts for payments to creators, intentional misinformation, rage baiting, reply spamming, bad actors, and distortion of discourse between users. Listen to your product boss (sic),” user Rod Breslau wrote.
“The problem is that you are paying influencers to steal content from small accounts that you continue to restrict. Payment should be based on reshares so small accounts get an algorithm boost and also earn some of the credit (sic),” another user wrote.
Meanwhile, another compared X’s practices to TikTok: “The problem with creator funding is that you pay people who steal original work. Tiktok, on the other hand, doesn’t pay unless it’s original content. You’ve shared my videos a few times, but you’ve screencapped other accounts, so I don’t get any credit. Also, the AI accounts copy all the correspondence I make and it takes hours or even days. We should be able to report unoriginal posts. These accounts “They take money from people who actually make an effort to bring quality information to X,” wrote investigative journalist Anna Matson.
Some even pointed out an anti-India bias: “The problem is that monetization encourages sensationalism, fiction over facts, and hateful posts that often drive engagement. Anti-India, anti-India, anti-H1B posts (not for legitimate reasons and views) are a prime example of how monetization is hijacked (sic),” wrote one user.
What is X’s creator monetization program?
The creator monetization program was introduced by X under Musk’s leadership after acquiring the microblogging platform for $44 billion.
Under the program, X allows verified users to earn a share of advertising revenue based on users’ interaction with their posts.
However, since the system went live there have been many complaints about inconsistent earnings, delayed payments and unclear metrics.
With Musk now personally joining the conversation about X’s monetization plan, it remains to be seen whether the platform will quickly address creators’ concerns.
