Tony Haile, a British director of product who had been a cofounder of a startup that tried to sell subscriptions to an online news bundle, asked about getting users to pay for journalism. Musk said he liked the idea of having easy small payments a user could make to watch video or read a story. “We want to build a way to have media makers get paid for their work,” he said. He had privately come to the conclusion that Twitter’s biggest competitor was going to be Substack, the online platform that journalists and others were using to publish content and get paid by users.
