It appears that X owner Elon Musk is trying a new angle to increase X subscriptions, this time by giving it away to users with high follower counts within the app.
Or at least, high verified follower counts.

The plan outlines that users who have more than 2,500 paid users are entitled to X Premium for free and having more than 5,000 blue-tick accounts in the audience qualifies as X Premium+ for free.

Why

Well, hopefully Musk believes that the more people see others do have checkmarks, the more will pay for X, and he's surely also eager to get more people using Grok his AI chatbot, which he also announced this month will be available to all users of X Premium, not only those who pay for its most expensive tier.

Much like the latest version of full self-driving at Tesla, which he's also making available free for a limited time, Musk seems confident that when more can access the tools, that will increase hype and get more additional people paying for the same.

It could even reactivate blue checkmarks: Many famous users will regain their check mark. Perhaps you might recall that X restored a whole heap of celebrities' check marks after it took them away, after just a few days of doing so, because the latter undermines the exclusivity-and-value proposition associated with the marker.

Indeed, since the once vaunted blue checkmark now only means that you are paying to use a free app, most of the add-on features of X Premium do not resonate with most users.

This is the latest of Musk's moves to increase X Premium take-up, and to get more revenue from the app. When Elon took over Twitter in late 2022, one of the key elements of his plan on taking over the company was to maximize its business value by including subscription revenue, which Musk said the company would eventually derive half of its revenue from, by subscriptions.
That hasn't worked out yet.

Estimates indicate that X Premium current has less than a million subscribers, out of the 550 million total users, reported by X, while addition of Grok, Musk's answer to ChatGPT, seems also has failed to generate significant additional interest.
Grok is the flagship product from xAI, X Corp's AI offshoot, largely and rather obligingly courtesy of a pretty fractious relationship with a co-founder being told, in a nutshell, that Elon Musk wasn't wanted to be part of the company, Open AI. X has long since stumped up millions in GPUs to power its new chatbot.

In short, X should start selling more subscriptions but is unlikely to be the time an AI bot could really turn around for getting more subscribers on board.

But more access means more usage, and would likely bring more interest in the feature. That sounds like the logic being applied, but again, I remain skeptical that anyone who isn't already paying for X Premium is going to care much about most of the add-on elements.