Copyright Gizmodo
If you love paying for things, and you love posting on social media, Elon Musk’s X says it will soon have another exciting opportunity for you: a “marketplace” where users can buy notable @handles. But part of the program will be less of a market than a perk for X Premium+ and Premium Business members that seems like less of a perk the more you think about it, unless you’re positive you want to pay for X for all eternity. In its description of the program, X says it will be “redistributing handles that are no longer in active use, but still attached to old accounts.” Some handles—one example the site provides is @Pizza—will be acquired either for free through “public drops” for accounts deemed to have sufficient merit, or by direct purchase. Pricing will apparently start at $2,500 and run to $1 million or more, “depending on demand and uniqueness.” It’s a fairly complex program though, and it seems “priority handles” will not be simply purchased. They’ll be a new subscriber perk for Premium+ and Premium Business subscribers, available at no additional cost. The example the site provides of a priority handle is @PizzaEater. There’s a pretty huge catch though: “If you cancel or downgrade your subscription after receiving a Priority Handle, your old handle will be restored,” the program description says. That’s a harsh switcheroo to pull on someone who changes their handle, forms relationships, and gets established with that name, but then, say, falls on hard times, and can no longer pay $40 per month for a Premium+ membership to a formerly free service. X may also want to consider what it wants to do with the priority handles of users who die.
