Elon Musk widens gap as most followed Twitter account

As reported by The South African website, Elon Musk last month surpassed former US President Barack Obama as the most followed account on Twitter, six months after he bought the platform in a tumultuous takeover.

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And the South Africa-born billionaire has continued to widen the gap over Obama – and the rest of the world on the social media platform.

The founder of Tesla and SpaceX at the time of publishing had 137 738 862 Twitter followers, nearly five million ahead of Obama, who had 132 760 332.

Justin Bieber is in third place with 112 932 092 followers.

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Elon Musk has slashed Twitter’s payroll

Since taking control, Musk has sharply cut the group’s payroll from 7 500 employees to fewer than 2 000 and has put his faith in drumming up paid subscribers to make the platform financially viable – but the results have been disappointing.

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The app has seen a string of technical snafus, including an incident where tweets by Musk suddenly dominated the feeds of millions of users, even those not following the tycoon.

Musk has encouraged users to communicate more freely on Twitter and said the site would impose the least amount of censorship allowed by law.

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