My 𝕏 Revenue Fell 80%. Here Is Why I Am Not Complaining.

Consider a man who is handed a gift and then, some time later, watches that gift grow smaller in his hands. The natural human response is grievance. He measures the present against the recent past, finds the present wanting, and concludes that he has been wronged. This is a common error, and it deserves examination, because it rests on a confusion about what was ever owed to him in the first place. I want to walk through that confusion carefully, because I have lived inside it, and because I think a great many creators on 𝕏 are living inside it right now.

Let me begin with a date. On March of 2021 my account was permanently suspended. The word permanent is worth pausing on. It does not mean a long time. It means forever. For 640 days I was, by the explicit declaration of the platform that suspended me, gone for good. Thousands of my conservative friends received the same sentence. We were not throttled or shadow-banned. We were erased, and we were told the erasure was final.

Then, on October 27 of 2022, Elon Musk bought the company, and in November my account returned. So did the accounts of countless others who had been told their banishment was eternal. I want to be precise about my state of mind in that moment, because it is the foundation of everything that follows. I was not calculating. I was not thinking about monetization, audience growth, or revenue streams. I was simply thankful. A door that had been welded shut was suddenly open, and I walked through it with no expectation beyond the privilege of speaking again.

Here a puzzled reader might ask: if you expected nothing, why does the question of payment arise at all? The answer is that something unexpected happened next. On July 13 of 2023, Elon launched the creator ad revenue sharing program, and almost immediately I began receiving payments. I want to stress that I changed nothing about my conduct to earn them. I did what I had always done, which was to post my thoughts on the platform, perhaps too frequently. Over time I added my graphic headline posts, and when 𝕏 introduced Articles I moved my longform op-eds there. The payments grew. A hobby had quietly become a livelihood.

To understand why this mattered so much, I have to tell you about my daughter. Four years ago my ex-wife became seriously ill, and I made a decision that reorganized my entire life. I moved back to Highland Park so that my daughter, then an incoming high school freshman, could live with me full time. Before that I had been a first, third, and fifth weekend father, a man who poured himself into starting companies and advising startups. Now I became something I had never been, a full-time stay-at-home dad. Our house sat directly across from the high school, in fact it was the same home where the football phenom Matt Stafford grew up, and it became the headquarters of a single shared project, which was helping Erin build the life she wanted.

She told me her goals plainly. She wanted to attend Harvard. She wanted to become a lawyer and then a judge. We mapped out what that would require, the lacrosse and the marching band, the leadership posts, the part-time job, the community service. Because we lived across the street, she could roll out of bed and reach band practice before sunrise. I made her breakfast on the mornings she would eat, gave her a hug, and saw her off. I was there after school for the daily debrief, and I cooked our dinner each night. This was the shape of our days for the last four years.

Now consider the timing. Shortly after the revenue program began, I realized the payments were enough to cover all of my bills. This was not a small thing. Before becoming a stay-at-home father I had tried to find conventional work, a position at a consulting firm or a company, and I had found that the market for white, male, 50-something serial entrepreneurs is thinner than one might hope. The platform offered me something the conventional economy had declined to offer, which was a way to support my daughter and myself while remaining physically present in her life every single day.

So I leaned in. I became more deliberate about what I posted and why. I still make mistakes, but I now spend real time asking what a given piece is meant to accomplish. My aim was never to maximize revenue. It was to advance a point of view and to inform and educate. The irony, and it is a genuine irony worth sitting with, is that pursuing the mission rather than the money turned out to be lucrative enough. From there I cultivated sponsors, subscribers, and advertising revenue off the platform, and that off-platform income eventually exceeded my highest 𝕏 payouts. What had started as a way to pay the bills became a way to send my daughter to college and law school without burying her under the crushing debt that an Ivy League education ordinarily demands.

This brings me back to the confusion I named at the outset. Over the past couple of months, my 𝕏 creator revenue fell by roughly 80%. Many creators are experiencing similar declines as the platform realigns its revenue share and adjusts its algorithm, and many are angry. I understand the anger, but I do not share it, and I want to explain why with as much clarity as I can manage.

The word that resolves everything is share. A share is not a salary. A salary is owed. It is the contractual price of labor, and to withhold it is to commit a wrong. A share is something else entirely. It is a portion of a common pool, distributed according to rules the pool’s owner is free to revise. When my share grew, I was not collecting a debt. I was receiving a gift. And it is a category mistake, a confusion of one kind of thing for another, to feel wronged when a gift is reduced. The platform did not break a promise to me, because it never made one. It owes me nothing, and it never did.

Once you see this clearly, the recent changes look very different. When Nikita Bier posts examples of creators manipulating the system to extract payouts, two thoughts occur to me in sequence. The first, I confess, is a flicker of worry that my own work might be misread as manipulative, though I do not believe it is. The second, and the more important, is gratitude that he is rooting such behavior out. Because the payout is a share of a finite pool, every dollar siphoned off by manipulation is a dollar taken from the creators 𝕏 actually wants to reward. Weeding out the abusers does not shrink the garden. It leaves more room for the creators who are growing something real.

So my counsel to frustrated creators is simple, and I offer it as someone who has every material reason to be content and no reason to flatter the platform. Be patient. Keep doing your best work. If you do, the platform will reward you one way or another, perhaps through distribution alone, the simple gift of being heard, and perhaps through monetary compensation as well. Do not lose hope. I hope to remain one of the rewarded creators, and I hope to become an even better one, but here is the heart of it. Even if I am not, even if the payments vanish entirely, I will remain grateful that the platform exists and that I am permitted to participate in it. If the revenue returns, I will be thankful. If it disappears forever, I will be fine.

I can speak this plainly because of what the program already gave me, and what it gave me cannot be revoked by any algorithm. It gave me four years of presence in my daughter’s life. It let me be there for all of it, and this month I watched Erin graduate. She earned that stage entirely on her own, and she deserves 99% of the credit. She graduated summa cum laude from Highland Park High School. She earned a perfect score on the ACT. She was president of the band and president of Youth in Government, she represented her school at Girls State in the Capitol, she worked at the sub shop down the street, she played lacrosse, she helped launch a nonprofit, and she simply outworked everyone around her. In the fall she heads to Yale College. Her achievement is hers. What the platform gave me was the chance to be present for every step of it, and now that she is leaving I am only beginning to grasp how much I will miss her.

As for what comes next, I am moving next month, not far, to a home where I am building a video studio. Alongside my graphic headline posts and my longform 𝕏 Articles, I will begin daily livestreaming on 𝕏. I will also continue the weekly livestream I do with Chris Salcedo, “The Third Rail,” which airs Wednesdays at 5 p.m. CST. So I close not with a complaint but with a thank you, offered freely and without reservation, to Elon Musk and the entire 𝕏 team. You restored my voice when others had declared it gone forever. Everything after that has been a gift, and a gift is something one receives with gratitude, not something one demands as a right. I am looking forward to the future.

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