In June 2024, Robby Lefkowitz was sitting at his desk, working for a protein company and “bored,” when he decided to have some fun online.
Noticing that a bunch of X accounts were popping up, naming themselves after neighborhoods—East Village Guy, Williamsburg Wrangler—Lefkowitz decided to make one of his own. He called himself Murray Hill Guy. Two and a half years later, he has been doxxed, sued, reviled on the platform, and paid a little under $80,000 by Elon Musk’s social network for the privilege.
“I would say probably 80% [of the posts] I stand by,” Lefkowitz told Fortune, adding that the other 20% is meant to be a bit more provocative and “get the people going.”
That 20% is the subject of a reckoning within X, which reached its endpoint this week. On Sept. 7, X shut down Creator Revenue Sharing, the program that had paid posters based on impressions since July 2023, and replaced it with something called Original Content Rewards.
Original Content Rewards pays for unique views of posts by Premium subscribers on the Homepage timeline. To get in, an account needs 500 verified followers and 500,000 of those verified Home timeline impressions over the prior 90 days, and it has to keep posting original content to stay in.
The new rules are trying to ban copied content, engagement solicitation and anything “potentially harmful,” calling the previous program “misaligned.” Lefkowitz and other creators who make money off X say the program didn’t invent the urge to post, but it did help change what ended up on the timeline.
The program marks an interesting shift, an admission that the way X paid its creators shaped what they posted, which meant provocation and aggregation. Nikitia Bier, X’s ex-head of product, spent the spring playing whack-a-mole on the aggregator payouts and denouncing accounts by name. He stepped down two days before the new program was announced.
Lefkowtiz was approved for the new program on the first day. X did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
50 million views and a check ‘in the thousands’
Murray Hill Guy had its big break last summer, when he posted a screenshot of a woman cancelling a date with a man who refused to say whether he voted for Zohran Mamdani. The post drew more than 50 million views and, he says, roughly half his current following. The next biweekly check from X was “in the thousands.”
Since then, Lefkowitz has focused his account mostly on dating content, posting manosphere-esque stuff about “fat chicks” getting dates, women’s body counts, and most commonly, screen-recording of a woman’s dating profile or TikTok and asking his followers to comment on her appearance.
He recently turned the internet against him in August, when a woman whose photo he had attached to a fictional dating story posted his real face and name in reply. It was, he says, the fourth or fifth time he’s been doxxed. “It happens every three to six months.”
He doesn’t think she crossed a line. “She can do the same thing that I did. Fair is fair.” He also concedes that the story he posted about the woman was made up, and that he shouldn’t have used a stranger.
Lefkowitz has a girlfriend. She knows about the account and, he says, is fine with it as long as he doesn’t cross her lines: “Don’t post other girls. Don’t be too crazy.” He met her, he’s quick to note, “outside, in the wild,” which is also his standard reply to critics who say he’s poisoned dating in New York: “Go outside and just meet someone in real life.”
The irony of a full-time poster telling people to log off doesn’t bother him. “Online isn’t real,” he says. “Everyone has some type of persona online, and yes, it could be in person as well, but usually it’s not the same. I can say that for myself too.”
For Lefkowitz, though, what might seem like a bad day of mean quote-tweet dunking is actually a payday: “Any engagement is good.”
A typical month posting for Lefkowitz has paid between $3,000 and $10,000 from X. That’s on top of brand deals—Polymarket paid $1,500 for a single post—and a coaching business. He spends just two to three hours a day working on the account. The stories come from friends, DMs and the walk to get coffee. “Everything could be a story.”
X never contacted him about any rule violations. But when a separate account posted his phone number, he says friends who work at the company got it banned.
‘Half my rent’
Other creators are still making bank without posting as much controversy.
ColdHealing, an account that spent years posting uncaptioned TikTok screenshots as a kind of anthropology of the internet, joined Revenue Sharing on day one and made about $25,000 over three years.
He describes the money as beside the point. Coldhealing, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his long-held enigmatic status to his 280,000 followers, said his earnings just go into his savings. The point, for him, is influence. “If a post isn’t you and gets a lot of impressions, it’s like nothing. You’re just contributing to the river that already exists. You want to steer the river.”
Another poster who goes by Basil online runs a popular election-forecasting account that he started in high school as a way to reply to Nate Silver. He now works as a machine-learning engineer but makes about $1,000 a month posting as Basil—”half my rent.” He has tried to figure out how X arrived at that payout amount, but still has no idea.
Neither thinks the money changed how they post, but they think it changed how others did. “Since monetization really blew up,” Basil says, “there are a lot of accounts that are just reposting Reddit or TikTok or rage-bait posts to get people to quote-tweet them.” ColdHealing noticed that his own TikTok reposts were quietly paying less than his friends’ posts months before the program was retired, and suspects X was already running an originality filter. “They’ve never really listed what you’re getting paid out for.”
Where they agree with Lefkowitz is why they keep posting. It predates the checks; it’s that blue bubble that pops up in your notifications. “Twitter’s always been a little dopamine simulator,” Basil says. “The more likes I get, the happier I get.” ColdHealing traces it to the day X started showing view counts on every post. “That was free monetization.”
Basil thinks the platform was better off before it paid anyone. “I’m not complaining. But I do think it was a net negative overall.” Coldhealing, also careful not to imply he was complaining, agrees that the payouts were “mildly” corrosive to the culture. But he thinks paying people for their “impression-based work” is a good precedent and expects the checks to get bigger, not smaller.
For Lefkowitz, the money is in his head, but he also wants to people to enjoy themselves. “I want people to engage for the monetization, but on the other side, go outside, laugh about it, don’t take anything too seriously.”
If X weren’t paying, would he still post the stuff that enraged people? “Probably less, for sure.”
