How Elon Musk’s account dominates X

Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022, vowing to make it a public city market. He quickly became the most powerful superuser on the site.

Musk surpassed former President Barack Obama in March 2023 to become the most followed person on the platform with 133 million followers. Since then, his numbers have increased by 52%.

In contrast, Obama’s followers fell slightly by about 2 million to just over 131 million followers. (Bot accounts exist on X and may be a factor in some of the accounts.)

In addition to Musk’s ballooning number of followers, engagement with his posts has increased. During a two-week period in October, Musk’s 1,220 posts averaged nearly 65,000 interactions, according to a Times analysis of Musk’s posts over the past year, which counted likes and retweets. During a similar period a year ago, his posts averaged around 30,000 engagements.

Attention and interaction are unique to Musk, according to the Times analysis. Twenty-seven posts on Obama’s account — still the second most popular — received 5,73,000 shares during a two-week period in early October. The 1,200 posts on Musk’s account have been reposted nearly 11 million times.

Much of Musk’s influence on X comes from the pace at which he posts, which has skyrocketed in recent months. In June, he posted 504 times, according to data collected from his account by Bright Data, an online data collection service. By September, he was posting over 1,000 times a month.

So what did Musk use his account dominance on X for?

In recent weeks, he has posted almost exclusively about politics. Some of that includes misleading information about the election, according to a study by the nonpartisan fact-checking service PolitiFact.

Musk, 53, has claimed that a vast fraud is underway to steal the election from Trump and that Democrats are sending immigrants into the country to vote illegally, among other false narratives. Musk’s posts in the first two weeks of October that fueled conspiracy theories about the election, the government’s response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and voter ID laws have been viewed nearly 679 million times, rated more than 5.3 million times and have been posted over 1.6 times. millions of times, according to PolitiFact.

“If Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election,” Musk posted on September 29. The post has been viewed more than 103 million times and reposted nearly 180,000 times.

“He’s using his platform to spread these ridiculous and harmful conspiracy theories,” said Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theorist and author of a book about QAnon, a pro-Trump movement that claims the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles who he worships Satan. . “He enabled this vast and very profitable network of disinformation spreaders, being one himself.”

Can X users escape Musk? Anecdotally at least, the answer is no.

When new users create accounts on X, the platform recommends who to follow. Musk is one of the first accounts suggested, the Times found by logging half a dozen accounts last month. X also suggests users follow topics related to his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.

Musk has previously taken steps at X to ensure his account is front and center. After a post by President Joe Biden about the 2023 Super Bowl received more engagement than Musk’s, the billionaire asked X’s teams to find a way to improve their numbers, three people with knowledge of the matter said. field.

A month later, the company released the code that drives its recommendation algorithm in an effort to be transparent. The code contained a snippet that marked Musk’s posts as a priority. The public code has not been updated since then.

“There are fewer and fewer non-Musk ‘main characters,’ and basically anyone who gets in will be subsumed into Musk’s orbit,” Brooking said.

In Pennsylvania, a swing state where Musk has made a huge effort to campaign for Trump, the Times interviewed more than a dozen X users last month and found that eight were seeing Musk’s posts on their “For You” timelines — even if only one of them followed him.

Some of Musk’s posts seen by Pennsylvania X users include a pro-Trump meme, a recent SpaceX rocket launch and an accusation that Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent, created an “incitement to violence.”

Musk’s overwhelming presence on X frustrated some users.

“He’s definitely a really smart guy, but if I don’t follow him, he shouldn’t be on my page,” said Jakob Fallat, 19, a Montgomery County Community College student who lives in suburban Philadelphia. He typically uses the X four times a week to watch sports, he said.

Jack Dugan, 20, a student at Gwynedd Mercy University in Lower Gwynedd Township, Pennsylvania, said he used X primarily to follow his friends and get news about sports and politics. Unfollows Musk but still sees his posts.

“It’s pretty much all he’s posting now is, ‘Trump, Trump, Trump,'” Dugan said, adding that he’s undecided who he’ll vote for. “I’m not very big on it.”