Elon Musk simply handed the 100 million follower mark on Twitter, turning into the sixth person on the platform to achieve a nine-digit follower depend. In keeping with SocialBlade, Musk hit the milestone someday between June twenty sixth and June twenty seventh, gaining over 150,000 followers between the 2 days. As of this writing, Musk now has 100,059,886 followers.
Hitting the milestone is attention-grabbing for a few causes. First is the apparent indisputable fact that Musk is at present within the course of of shopping for Twitter for $44 billion, which might ultimately put him within the distinctive place of being the one chief of a significant social media community who’s really good at utilizing their social media community. In distinction, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Fb web page is broadly a feed of press releases, whereas Instagram head Adam Mosseri has a equally saccharine presence on the platform he manages.
Musk is a wholly completely different beast. Right here’s how my colleague Elizabeth Lopatto lately described his Twitter persona:
Musk is a Poster for certain. Annoying, obnoxious, late to memes — however undoubtedly a Poster. He makes use of Twitter as supposed: as a direct line to his id. Has he deliberate to comply with up on any of the stuff he tweets? Incessantly, no. And that’s what makes him so entertaining… Musk engages in name-calling, typically so intensely that he winds up with defamation lawsuits on his palms… Shit, one time Musk introduced he was taking Tesla non-public on Twitter, usually to the shock of Tesla, Tesla’s buyers, and the SEC.
It’s truthfully exceptional how completely different Musk’s Twitter utilization is from the 5 different accounts to have hit the 100 million follower mark. Barack Obama’s account posts frequent updates, however they’re each bit as thought of and presidential as you’d anticipate, whereas Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Cristiano Ronaldo have the sorts of Twitter presences that would solely come from the collective mind of a professionally educated comms group. To his credit score, I’d consider that Justin Bieber’s account is managed by the person himself, however he hasn’t tweeted since February sixteenth.
The second attention-grabbing side of Musk’s hitting 100 million followers is the query: what number of of those accounts are actual and what number of are pretend? Twitter has persistently estimated that lower than 5 p.c of the accounts on its platform are bots, however Musk has voiced considerations that the quantity might be far increased, and has threatened to stroll away from his deal to purchase Twitter if the corporate doesn’t present extra proof for its numbers.
Questions stay about whether or not Musk is definitely involved about Twitter spam bots, or whether or not he’s simply utilizing them as a pretext to barter a lower cost for purchasing Twitter (right here’s Bloomberg’s Matt Levine laying out the proof). However, regardless, Twitter has reportedly responded by giving Musk a “firehose” of its knowledge in response to Musk’s claims. However The Wall Avenue Journal reviews that there are doubts anybody might draw significant conclusions from such a lot of info inside an affordable timeframe.
Usually a prolific tweeter, Musk has hit the 100 million milestone after not tweeting for nearly per week. His final publish that wasn’t a reply to another person was from June twenty first, and apparently confirmed fuel priced at $7.11 at 7-Eleven. Snopes reviews that the picture is definitely from March 2021 and exhibits take a look at pricing to advertise the opening of a brand new retailer moderately than being a mirrored image of hovering fuel costs in 2022.
Yesterday, Musk posted a sequence of tweets about loving cheese.
