Do you want an unused Twitter handle? Well, you’d better have $50,000

You just REALLY love Hot Wheels, and you think that @HotweelzGuy fits your tastes perfectly; however, someone else claimed it. Well, if it’s gone unused, there’s still hope to have it. You can buy an unused Twitter handle from the company, but you’re probably going to have to sell your house to do it.

According to an email seen by Forbes (via SamMobile), the company is working on a handle marketplace where people can sell their old and unused handles. So, these will be user-to-user sales only. The company started deactivating unused and bot accounts earlier this year. However, X is not currently planning to sell those purged accounts.

You can buy an unused Twitter handle, but it’s a bit pricey

So, if you’re wondering about the pricing, it’s not pretty. You wouldn’t expect a Twitter handle to cost much; it’s literally a line of text/numbers. But, apparently, it’s worth a lot to Elon Musk. If you move to buy a handle from a user, you’ll need to pay a $50,000 flat fee to X.

That’s already high, but 100% of that fee will go to X; the seller doesn’t see any of that, so the seller will need to charge more on top of that to make any money. So, the price you pay could be much higher.

As you can imagine, the mass majority of people will not want to pay that much money for a handle. It’s much cheaper just to add a few characters to the end of their dream handle and call it a day. This way, they could have a good handle and not go into debt.

At this point, we don’t know when this marketplace is going to open up. When it eventually does, who knows if this will be a revenue stream for the company or just another failed attempt to make the app profitable.