The requirement to create an account to view replies/threads is a show stopper for me and it has somehow made Twitter even more useless. It barely had value when it was freely legible but it's not worth sharing data with them to get festering garbage in return.

Yet he thinks people are going to pay for it?

We live in a world where social media and communication are commoditized as fuck and people refuse to pay premiums for shit they can do for free elsewhere. How is Twitter going to compete with Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Reddit, and Facebook when it's arguably the worst choice, objectively the least feature rich, yet the only one that costs money?

He's seemed oddly desperate for money not only about twitter, but also how he's the 1 or 2 wealthiest person in the world yet feels the need to run crypto pump-and-dump scams and game the stock market.

I think the biggest problem at this point is how much Twitter has replaced a core part of how journalism used to function. Back in the day, if a company/organization/famous person/etc was doing something of note, they would write a press release and send it to news organizations, who would then decide how to cover (or not cover) the story.

Now, shit just gets tweeted out and a good chunk of journalism is just putting a few words around that tweet and calling it news. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow and no clone immediately popped up in its place, modern journalism would collapse.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

You could ask the same about paying for verification. But a very surprising number of people did that.

I agree with your core point in general, but the reality possibly is "lots of people". The vast, vast majority of people appear to have stuck with TwitX because that's where the people are. People aren't moving to other places because the people aren't there. A jillion organizations, "influencers", wanna-be "influencers", etc are still there because of inertia that surprisingly hasn't run out.

And a whole bunch of idiots have paid for the blue checkmark because they are desperate for attention and think they'll get more views that way. In many cases they're right.

This move, I think, would be more likely to motivate people to move or avoid the platform, but it's ridiculous to me how many people are left after all the other bullshit (including requiring logins, dropping blocking, all the right-wing propaganda and terrible recommendations in general, Musk's behavior, at least a handful of people dropping the platform, etc).

He may be losing money and advertisers but holy shit are a bunch of people still there.

Shitfluencers, bots and corporate profiles

I would imagine people with huge followings and money to burn. Once the paywall is up, those huge followings are going to shrink fast.