Elon Musk’s Meme-Spreading, Critic-Blocking, Ego-Inflating Twitter Feed by the Numbers
A deep dive into who he retweets, what grabs his attention, how many bots are really in his follower count.
On October 27, new Twitter owner Elon Musk posted his third-most-liked tweet ever: “The bird is freed.” (No. 1 was his infamous putting-cocaine-back-into-Coke joke. No. 2 was his free-speech bear hug to critics.)
Suddenly Musk’s obsessive Twitter use became more than just a headline generator. It also offered a tantalizing peek into how he will run the $41 billion company. With so much of Musk’s capital and so many thousands of jobs at stake, all of Silicon Valley is now trying to understand one man’s psyche. And so, we set out to glean what we could from his own use of the platform.
We’ve pored over data, consulted with social media analytics companies and, in a true act of journalistic sadism, created a mock feed of the 127 accounts Musk personally follows—all to give you a glimpse into how the world’s richest man uses the bird app, and how his feed might soon impact your own.
