Only five months after a contentious takeover, Elon Musk has surpassed former US President Barack Obama as the most followed account on Twitter.
Obama had 133,041,813 Twitter followers on Thursday, just a few more than Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who had 133,084,560.
The accomplishment comes at a time when it seems that Twitter’s status as a crucial forum for the sharing of news, ideas, and public relations message is under threat.
Elon Musk recently informed his staff that the company was only worth half the $44 billion he invested in it, and the businessman is still attempting to determine how to relax content regulation without upsetting advertisers and government authorities.
Since taking control, Mr. Musk has sharply cut the group’s payroll from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000 and put his faith in drumming up paid subscribers to make the platform financially viable — but the results have been disappointing.
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.
Elon Musk has encouraged users to communicate more freely on Twitter and said the site would impose the least amount of censorship allowed by law.
The platform said that starting on April 1, the trust-building “blue tick” for certain individual accounts — such as celebrities or journalists — would be rolled back and reserved for paying subscribers.
