Elon Musk said on Tuesday that Twitter might charge a “slight” fee for commercial and government users, part of the billionaire entrepreneur’s push to grow revenue which has lagged behind larger rivals like Facebook.

“Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users,” Musk said in a tweet. “Some revenue is better than none!” he added in another tweet.

Musk has told banks he would develop new ways to monetise tweets and crack down on executive pay to slash costs at the social media platform company. Musk also told the banks he planned to develop features to grow business revenue, including new ways to make money out of tweets that contain important information or go viral, sources said.

At the annual Met Gala in New York on Monday, Musk said the reach of Twitter was currently only “niche”, and he would want a much bigger percentage of the country to be on it.

Musk, also the CEO of Tesla, has been suggesting a raft of changes to Twitter since last month. In tweets which were subsequently deleted, Musk suggested changes to Twitter Blue premium subscription service, including slashing its price, banning advertising and giving an option to pay in the cryptocurrency dogecoin.

After inking the deal to buy Twitter for US$44-billion last week, Musk said he wanted to enhance the platform with new features, make the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeat spam bots and authenticate all humans. — Shivani Tanna, Maria Ponnezhath and Shubham Kalia, (c) 2022 Reuters