A New Report Shows How Suspicious Elon Musk's Follower Count Is
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A new report has shed some pretty interesting light on Elon Musk's Twitt- sorry, X followers.
Reducing spam bots on the platform formerly known as X has long been a part of Elon's general huffing and puffing, including when he was contemplating buying the hellscape:
If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022
Since then, Elon has boasted removing a "vast number of bots":
Also, this is after removal of a vast number of bots
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 28, 2023
Musk became the most followed person on not-Twitter in March, with 153.9 million followers at present. That's ahead of Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Rihanna. Suspicious-looking followers on a celebrity account have long been documented, and one report last year estimated that nearly half of Musk's followers were fake — 7% higher than comparable accounts.
The same account estimated that Obama's following was 44% fake.
Now, new data from Mashable and Travis Brown estimated that 42% of Musk's followers — over 65.3 million users — have zero followers. What's more, over 72% of Musk's followers had less than 10 followers on their account.
Similar vibes follow when it comes to how much Musk's followers actually make content: 62.5 million of them have zero tweets, and the majority have less than 10 tweets posted.
More than a quarter of his followers reportedly created their accounts on the day of or after Musk completed his Twitter acquisition last October.
When it comes to what the profiles look like, around 25% have the default X profile picture, and 40% have four or more numbers in their handle.
And when it comes to X Premium, Elon's big attack on the bots, only about 0.3% of his followers subscribe. Of course, it's not easy to detangle the lurkers from the bots here — but sure casts quite the picture, huh?
