Elon Musk becomes the most-followed person on Twitter, has more followers than Barack Obama

By Divyanshi SharmaElon Musk introduced some radical changes after taking over as Twitter’s new boss and is now the most-followed person on the platform. Earlier, former US president Barack Obama had the most number of followers on the micro-blogging site. However, Musk has now dethroned Mr Obama and is now the most-followed person on Twitter.

Elon Musk is the most-followed person on Twitter

Elon Musk has 133,091,575 Twitter followers at the time of writing this story. On the other hand, Barack Obama has 133,042,221 followers on the social media platform. While Musk talks about all sorts of things on Twitter (ranging from memes to calling out his competitors), Mr Obama uses it mostly for professional reasons. Moreover, Musk reached 100 million followers in June last year.

Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition

Elon Musk bought Twitter in a much-publicised deal last year. The billionaire paid around USD 44 billion for the social media platform and introduced a number of changes the moment he assumed his new role. The first thing that he did was to fire the company’s previous CEO, Parag Agrawal, along with other senior executives. Then, Musk introduced various changes in the company’s work culture and asked employees to brace themselves for tough working conditions in order to build his ‘Twitter 2.0’.

However, after roughly five months of him acquiring Twitter, Musk said that the company is now worth less than half the value of what he paid for it. The billionaire revealed that the company is valued at USD 20 billion.

Elon Musk took charge as Twitter’s boss on October 27, 2022. Things have changed since then, not just for Twitter employees, but for users as well. Talking about the change for users, the most prominent one, perhaps, has been the introduction of Twitter Blue, which lets anybody buy a blue tick for a fee.

In India, the blue tick can be bought for Rs 900 per month on iOS and Android devices, and for Rs 630 on Twitter web. The accounts that had obtained verification before Musk’s takeover are called accounts with a ‘legacy blue tick’. And the new Twitter boss isn’t really fond of them. From April 1, these legacy blue ticks will be snatched away from users and the only way that they can stay verified will be if they are willing to pay Musk a monthly fee and subscribe to Twitter Blue.

For those who choose to remain unverified, Musk announced two features that will be taken away from them.

In a recent tweet, he wrote, “Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations. The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle. Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.”

But what about those who choose to purchase a Twitter Blue subscription for their bot accounts? Well, Musk says that those are ‘okay’ as long as they follow Twitter’s terms and ‘don’t impersonate a human’.

When Elon Musk talked about shadowbanning accounts

Last month, some Twitter users pointed out that the accounts on the social media site were being shadowbanned. For the uninitiated, shadowbanning means users’ content being invisible to others, without them (the user) getting a notification about the practice.

Replying to a tweet on shadowbanning, Musk pointed out that the ‘idiotic algorithm’ had been fixed. He wrote, “This idiotic algorithm change has been reverted. It also caused my account engagement to drop by a factor of ten, because it was based on absolute number of blocks, not blocks as a percentage of followers. This meant any large account that posted anything “controversial” was sent to the 9th level of hell.”

Twitter, before Musk’s takeover, had more than 7,000 employees. However, now the company has roughly 2,000 people working on building Musk’s ‘Twitter 2.0’.