Elon Musk says Twitter is preparing to delete 1.5 billion inactive accounts to free up dormant handles

• Elon Musk said Thursday that Twitter will soon delete 1.5 billion inactive accounts.
• He said this would free up "name space" — dormant Twitter handles attached to the accounts.

Twitter is preparing to delete 1.5 billion inactive accounts to free up dormant handles, or user names, on the platform, owner Elon Musk said Thursday.

Musk said the deletions would free up the "name space" of dormant accounts, adding that the accounts to be deleted were "obvious" because they had "no tweets" and "no log in for years."

Some Twitter users have complained that inactive accounts have unusual and desirable handles that were snared in Twitter's early days.

In the second quarter of 2022, Twitter counted 237.8 million of its users as "monetizable daily active users," a measure that suggests they're active on the platform and are being shown advertisements.

Musk has previously promised to remove inactive accounts from Twitter. In November, he said accounts that had been inactive for 15 years would be purged.

It's unclear at this point how long an account can be inactive before it's tagged for deletion. In October, Musk hinted that accounts that had been dormant for more than a year might also be at risk.

Representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside normal working hours.

Twitter usage appears to have risen in the weeks following Musk's takeover: in the first weekend of November, Twitter saw its most daily active users ever, according to data from Apptopia, seen by Insider.