Elon Musk now has 100 million followers on Twitter, the social media platform that he could be about to buy.
It means that he’s now followed by about 43% of the people who use the microblogging service, though that percentage may be markedly different if, as Musk suspects, a lot of those accounts are bots.
Despite the large figure, Musk still ranks only sixth among the most-followed people on Twitter. Here’s the top five:
– Barack Obama: 132.1 million
– Justin Bieber: 114.1 million
– Katy Perry: 108.8 million
– Rihanna: 106.9 million
– Cristiano Ronaldo: 101.3 million
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX joined Twitter in 2009, three years after the platform launched. In that time, he’s posted around 18,500 tweets across a huge range of subjects. And some of those tweets have gotten him into trouble with the authorities.
Oddly, Musk hasn’t shared anything on the service since June 22, marking possibly one of his longest stretches of Twitter silence in recent years.
It’s not clear if his silence has anything to do with his recent bid to acquire the microblogging service for more than $44 billion. The deal, which Musk proposed in April but which isn’t yet signed and sealed, hit a rough patch earlier this month when a lawyer acting for Musk said that unless Twitter handed over data on the number of fake and spam accounts on the platform, the billionaire entrepreneur could drop his bid.
San Francisco-based Twitter responded by handing over a huge trove of data, but it’s still not clear if this will be enough to keep the deal on track as analysts will have to examine the data to try to figure out the number of fake and spam accounts on the service.
Twitter has long claimed that fake and spam accounts make up only about 5% of its user base, though Musk fears the figure could be much higher. If it is, advertisers could leave the platform or demand lower rates, while Musk would likely feel compelled to try to reduce the value of his buyout offer, or simply walk away altogether.
In the meantime, we’re waiting for his next tweet …
