Twitter could still be financially challenged despite Elon Musk's efforts.
A former Twitter employee recently revealed that Musk's Twitter rate limit was allegedly motivated by the company's finances rather than AI companies' data scraping.
Musk previously placed a reading rate limit to offset the "aggressive data scraping" AI companies do so much that it was already affecting user experience.
Why Elon Musk Enacted The Twitter Rate Limit
Musk has been having some issues with being Twitter's Chief Technology Officer. His enactment of the Twitter Rate Limit not only harmed advertisers' perception of Twitter but also undid many of the things the company's new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, did to encourage advertisers to return to Twitter.
You may recall that Musk's Twitter rate limit now restricts unverified accounts to 800 tweets a day, 400 for new unverified accounts, and 8,000 tweets for Twitter Blue subscribers - a far cry from the old policy where anyone could read as many tweets as they wanted.
However, there may have been another reason for Musk to undermine Yaccarino and the work she's been doing - Twitter's finances.
According to a BBC report, Rumman Chowdhury, a former Twitter employee who left the company in Nov. 2022, revealed that AI companies' data scraping might not be the cause of Musk putting up limits on the social media website.
She believes that she is among a majority of people who believe that his lack of payment of his bills caused him to put a read limit on Twitter, to help reduce his costs.
Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, also expressed their skepticism of Musk's intentions for launching his Twitter rate limit; he said in a Bluesky post that AI companies scraping data on Twitter was the open secret of Twitter data access, that they knew about it and that it was fine, per Business Insider.
What didn't look fine for Roth, however, was that scraping suddenly created such dramatic performance problems that Twitter had no choice but to put everything behind a login.
Musk's Missteps
While Twitter has yet to address the possibility of Musk putting limits on Twitter to help him pay the company's bills, it does point toward him failing in one of his plans. You may recall that he previously stated he would only step down as Twitter's CEO if the company is "in a stable condition" around the time he vacates his post.
"I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it is in a financially healthy place and the product road map is clearly laid out," Musk said.
Since he found a new CEO in Yaccarino, it could be assumed that Twitter had become stable enough for Musk to step down from the role, but if Chowdhury rings true, then the company isn't out of the woods in terms of its financial health.
Whether Musk's limit will help him pay the bills remains to be seen.
