They already did this with Super Follows.

Any data on how that does? My guess is not that we’ll unless the content is richer than just text… and effectively largely becomes Patreon / onlyfans. It’s kind of hard to pull that off fully when the rest of the platform is fully free.

It's a ridiculous idea because it doesn't have any cultural or product fit. It reads like they looked at Substack, thought "ooh, money, gimme some of that!", and rolled out the same thing for their own product – but a tweet is a couple of hundred characters and nobody is paying for that. (Short of the small percentage of pathetic creeps who probably also send money to female streamers just to feel noticed.)

Reddit gold is an example of how to nail something like this, because it was done with tremendous sensitivity to the culture of the site. It's quirky, slightly ironic, riffs on the obvious silliness of a 'gift' that goes 99% to Reddit's coffers, and it's perfectly pitched to the user at the point where they are already feeling the value of Reddit's product & the other user's content. Twitter's, by contrast, is an example of how not to do it, for the converse of all those reasons and more besides.

There are a lot of politicians, activists, fundraisers, etc who communicate primarily through Twitter but send people to Patreon or GoFundMe or somewhere else to donate. That's an existing culture of soliciting donations on Twitter, and Twitter might be able to become the payment processor for some of those donations, if they do it right.

Twitter is for building an audience. Patreon and other platforms are where you best monetize that audience.

Putting both together could be incredibly lucrative but also would be treated very cautiously because of potential deplatforming.

Musk actual commitment to minimal moderation (what my mental model is for his free speech bent) could thread that needle and at the very least be a fascinating experiment to watch from the sidelines.