Twitter Blue is proving to be Elon Musk's biggest failure yet

Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue always felt like a long-shot; getting people to pay $8-a-month for a free service was a tough pitch.

The one perk was a blue checkmark, which led to fake accounts posing as celebrities and businesses, prompting the tech billionaire to create tiers to identify official accounts.

Alas, the Twitter Blue subscription service may be proving to be Musk’s biggest failure yet.

In a recent report from The Information, they obtained a document stating just 180,000 people in the US were paying for subscriptions on the platform, including Twitter Blue, in mid-January.

The small number indicates Musk can have a hard time turning the subscription product into a significant source of income.

The Information stated that the US number is about 62 per cent of Twitter’s global subscriber total, implying that the social media platform has just 290,000 global subscribers.

The global number of subscribers would also be valued at around $28m in annual revenue. That sounds a lot, but it's a tiny sum for a major tech company.

Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter

It’s only one per cent of the whopping $3bn Musk said Twitter hopes to make this year.

Musk has cut costs, letting go of more than three-quarters of Twitter employees, re-negotiated or canceled contracts and refused to pay bills.

He also burdened the company with roughly $1.2bn in annual interest payments from the debt he took out to purchase the platform, The Information stated.

Twitter will eventually force legacy verified accounts to subscribe to Twitter Blue or lose their blue check.

It is something that Musk said will happen “in a few months.”

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.