After hitting 100 million followers last June, Musk went on to buy the social media company for $44 billion dollars (Picture: AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
Elon Musk might not be the world’s richest person anymore but he’s managed to take the top spot with the most number of followers on Twitter.
The billionaire who is also the owner of Twitter, beat former US president Barack Obama to take the crown for the most followed person on Twitter.
As of right now, the billionaire has 133,069,129 followers compared to Obama’s 133,042,847, so it’s not a huge margin.
After hitting 100 million followers last June, Musk went on to buy the social media company for $44 billion.
It wasn’t a smooth road to ownership though with messy tweets and legal standoffs which almost led to a heated trial.
The billionaire beat former US president Barack Obama to take the crown for the most followed person on Twitter (Picture: Reuters)
Musk’s initial bid to take over Twitter surfaced in April after it was suggested he would join the company’s board. He later backtracked over concerns there were too many spam accounts on the platform.
Twitter proceeded to sue Musk to try to hold him to the deal contract. Before the case was set to go to trial, Musk expressed interest in following through with the acquisition.
Finally, in October, Musk confirmed his on-again, off-again deal to buy Twitter had gone through.
How many of Elon Musk’s followers are fake?
Twitter is infamous for being plagued with fake accounts or ‘bots’ which can boost the number of actual followers someone has.
Last May, a report by research tool SparkToro found that over 70% of Elon Musk’s followers appeared to be ‘fake’. These could include accounts that are bots, inactive, or set up to send spam or propaganda.
We ran the tool on Musk’s account again and found that the number has drastically reduced to 6.5%. So, out of his 133 million followers, only 8,651,097 could possibly be fake accounts.
The report also noted that Musk’s account had fewer fake followers than most. Accounts with a similar-sized following to the Twitter CEO reportedly had an average of 20% fake followers.
In comparison, 54.8% of Obama’s Twitter followers were found to be fake accounts. That’s 72,906,456 out of his 133,040,979 followers.
Musk is known for using the platform as his personal sounding board, with many controversial tweets that have gotten him in trouble. Not to mention the memes. So many memes.
Now, as ‘chief Twit’ he used his account to speculate, announce and get feedback on various changes to Twitter.
MORE : Musk, experts urge pause on making AI ‘more powerful’ citing ‘risks to society’
MORE : Elon Musk to scrap a number of features for non-paying Twitter users
