X Premium Is a Scam.
And Elon Musk Knows It.

Let's skip the polite version of this.

X made over $1 billion in annual revenue from Premium subscriptions in 2026. They announced that number proudly. And they should — it's an impressive figure. But here's what they didn't announce alongside it: how many of those paying subscribers cancelled. How many people paid, tried to grow, hit a wall, and quietly left.

They published the revenue. They buried the churn. That tells you everything.

The Experiment Nobody Signed Up For

Here's the thing about X right now: nobody knows what the rules actually are. Not because the rules aren't written down — they are. It's because the rules change constantly, without notice, and the algorithm doesn't care whether you followed yesterday's rules when it applies today's.

Creators did everything right. They read the guidelines. They stopped the aggressive reply farming that worked in 2023. They switched to original, high-effort content. They posted consistently. They engaged authentically. They paid for Premium to get the supposed algorithmic boost that was advertised as the whole point.

The result? Accounts with tens of thousands of Premium followers regularly see their posts cap out around a few hundred views. Not total reach — their own followers. People who explicitly chose to follow them. Who paid for a subscription that was supposed to let them see that content.

What X Support Actually Says

You contact support. You explain the problem. You provide data. You ask a specific question.

The response, paraphrased from hundreds of similar reports: "Our systems are working as intended. Reach fluctuates naturally. Give it time."

Give it time. A month later, nothing changed. Another month, same story. "Give it time" is not a support response. It's a strategy to outlast your frustration until you either quit or resign yourself to the situation. It works because most people do quit.

The ones who don't quit and keep pushing? They get told their account "doesn't meet content quality signals." No specifics. No actionable feedback. No appeal process that actually functions. Just a closed door with a polite sign on it.

The Accounts That Actually Get Boosted

While genuine creators are shadowboxing with an invisible algorithm, something else is thriving on the platform: low-effort repost accounts. Aggregators. Screenshot farms. Accounts that take someone else's viral tweet, screenshot it, and repost it with a one-word caption.

These accounts grow. Consistently. Visibly. Their engagement is real. The algorithm rewards them.

Ask yourself why. The answer is uncomfortable: repost accounts keep people on the platform longer. They surface content users already engaged with. They're optimized for time-on-app, not for creator quality. And time-on-app is what sells ads. Premium subscriptions are a revenue line item. Ad inventory is the business. If the algorithm serves ads, it will serve the accounts that maximize ad exposure — not the accounts that create the best content.

The Transparency Problem

X publishes the revenue number. They don't publish:

• Premium cancellation rates — what percentage of subscribers don't renew
• Creator reach metrics — average impressions per follower for Premium accounts
• Algorithm change logs — what changed, when, and why
• Suppression criteria — what triggers reduced distribution and how to reverse it

Every other major platform — YouTube, TikTok, Meta — publishes creator-facing documentation about how their algorithms work, what signals matter, and what changes were made. It's not perfect transparency, but it exists. X publishes nothing comparable.

The New Account Treadmill

Here's what the frustration cycle actually produces: people quit their old accounts and start new ones. Fresh start, fresh algorithm treatment, initial growth boost that new accounts always seem to get. Then the same wall, months later. Then another fresh start.

This is not a coincidence. Every new account is a new subscription. Every restart is recurring revenue from someone who already paid once and got nothing. The model monetizes failure. The worse the product works for established creators, the more new subscriptions it generates from people trying again.

It is, from a pure revenue standpoint, almost elegant. From a creator standpoint, it's a treadmill that charges you for the privilege of running in place.

The Real Question

Is X a platform for creators or a private experiment where user frustration is the entertainment?

The honest answer, based on everything the data shows: it was a platform for creators, briefly, when creator growth served the ad model. That window may have closed. What exists now is a product in permanent beta — features that half-work, policies that shift without warning, support that deflects without helping, and an algorithm that rewards the content that serves X's economics, not the content that serves X's users.

The $1 billion in Premium revenue isn't proof the product works. It's proof that enough people still believe it might. Those are different things.

This is an opinion piece. Views reflect the author's analysis of publicly available data and widely reported creator experiences on X. X's Premium revenue figures sourced from company announcements, February 2026.