Are Elon Musk’s followers on X fake? New data reveals this...

Elon Musk is undoubtedly one of the most followed persons on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, which he owns. He has around 153.9 million followers at the time of writing this report.

He has been one of the prolific users of the social media app, even before he bought it last October for a whopping $44 billion.

Over the months, he often boasted about how the number of users coming to X and consuming content increased.

However, recent data collected by third-party researcher Travis Brown has given some reality check,suggesting that the picture isn’t as rosy as depicted by Musk.

The data, which was reviewed by Mashable, shows that around 42 per cent of Musk’s own followers, or 65.3 million accounts, have zero followers on their account, indicating that they may be inactive.

Further, more than 72 per cent, or nearly 112 million, of these users following Musk have less than 10 followers on their account.

And as far as consuming content on the platform is concerned, over 62.5 million of Musk followers have zero tweets.

This includes users who have deleted all of their tweets by the time this data was collected over the past few weeks as well as accounts that have never before tweeted.

More than 100 million Musk followers have less than 10 tweets posted to their accounts.

Fake accounts?

Recently, the Tesla CEO claimed that X now has more than 540 million "monthly users".

Another interesting detail that has emerged from the data is exactly when his followers created their accounts.

Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter on October 27, 2022. Out of all of Musk's current followers, more than 25 per cent, or 38.9 million, were created on or after that date.

The average number of followers for all 153 million accounts following Musk is just around 187. However, Brown tells Mashable that the follower "distributions are so skewed" that the averages aren't "very meaningful" here.

The data has further shown how many of Musk’s followers subscribe to X Premium, previously known as Twitter Blue that was re-launched with a price tag of $8 a month.

Only around 453,000 Musk followers or 0.3 percent subscribe to X Premium, the data shows.

Earlier this week, Mashable reported earlier that there were around 830,000 X Premium subscribers in total based on another data set compiled by Brown.

(With inputs from agencies)

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