Based on Twitter’s general estimates of fake accounts, it’s possible to roughly estimate the number of inauthentic profiles following Elon Musk on the platform.
It is a symbolic marker that Elon Musk has just passed on Twitter, while the American entrepreneur is also trying to take control of the social network: his account now attracts more than 100 million Internet users, according to the counter visible on His profile. The news was aired by The Verge on June 28, 2022.
It was during the day of June 27 that this level was crossed by the businessman, says the SocialBlade site, which provides statistical monitoring tools for the main social networks – YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and others of lesser importance. On average, calculates SocialBlade, Elon Musk gains 150,000 subscribers every day.
There are only six other people with even more popular profiles: three artists, an athlete and a former politician. They are Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Christiano Ronaldo and Barack Obama. The former American president is the one with the most followed profile, with more than 132 million Internet users following his tweets.
5 million fake accounts behind Elon Musk’s profile on Twitter?
But if we exclude fake accounts from the equation, we must probably subtract several million from this total. The platform has had a long-standing difficulty with “fakes” and Elon Musk is obviously not immune to the problem. His immense notoriety even suggests that he is more affected than any other member of the social network.
Knowing the number of real Internet users following Elon Musk would require privileged access behind the scenes of Twitter. The only metric we have is the estimate given by Twitter, which states thatthere are less than 5% fake accounts on the platform. Elon Musk does not believe this percentage and says there are many more fakes, but it could be a maneuver on his part.
Assuming that this rate applies to Elon Musk, the wealthy businessman would have around 5 million fake accounts among his subscribers. This is a score that is particularly high. By comparison, an official profile like that of Emmanuel Macron is followed by more than 8 million people (of which a fraction is also inauthentic).
In fact, it’s a safe bet that Elon Musk attracts many more fakes, because of the exceptional audience he enjoys and his activities. This can be seen in the scam attempts that are flourishing on Twitter that rely on the identity of the billionaire. Many of these inauthentic accounts follow him, where the average person on Twitter does not face this problem.
There are therefore certain limitations in this attempt at evaluation. That said, it may be from Elon Musk himself that the right number will come. The entrepreneur ended up getting the site at the beginning of June to give him access to all the tweets published on the platform in real time so that he could calculate the number of fake accounts on his own. Including his.