Three years ago, Elon Musk took over the social media platform then called Twitter and a lot has changed in the meantime – from the company going private to layoffs, a name change to X and Donald Trump returning after a ban. Less content moderation on X has drawn much criticism and the platform has also seen a decrease in advertising revenue, according to analysts. The popularity of the network has been disputed since it stopped publishing user numbers, but a look at X's most popular accounts shows that several have started to lose followers.
With one notable exception: Elon Musk's own account has seen its follower count explode to more than 225 million most recently. Before buying the company, his follower count on the platform had stood at around 70 million in January 2022, according to number accumulated by Datareportal.
Among the top 8 of accounts, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Barack Obama and Justin Bieber have started to lose followers. Meanwhile, two politicians on the right of the spectrum, Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, have gained popularity on X. This also applies to soccer player Christiano Ronaldo.
At the beginning of the month, news broke that ex-CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, as well as three more executives had reached a settlement with Musk almost three years after they were fired. In March, info leaked that as part of a financial deal, X had once again been valued at $44 billion, the price Musk purchased it for in 2022. Previously, this value had been cited as low as $10 billion. With the three year anniversary coming up, YouTube personality MrBeast renewed his quest to become CEO of X as Linda Yaccarino stepped down from the role.
