As of August 2023, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk was the most followed person on the platform, with little over 140 million followers. Additionally, former U.S. President Barack Obama amassed 132 million followers on the micro-blogging service. In April 2023, Musk changed Twitter's legal name to X Corp.

Celebrities and Twitter

Founded in 2006 as Twitter, X is an online social networking and microblogging service that allows users to post text-based status updates and messages of up to 280 characters in length. As of the fourth quarter of 2020, X had 192 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU) worldwide.

X provides a near-instant access channel to celebrities. The majority of the top ten most-followed X accounts are entertainers who use the medium to communicate with fans, spread relevant news regarding their work or work on their public image. The near-instant gratification through a stream of direct updates from celebrities or personalities as well as the feeling of belonging to a particular group of fans is a popular reason for social media users to use X. In order to establish authenticity of identity on X, accounts of people from high-interest areas such as music, fashion, entertainment, politics, media, business or other areas as well as individuals at high risk of impersonation are verified by X. The verification badge symbolizes that the account is maintained by a legitimate source.

Major sporting events and industry award shows such as the Super Bowl, the Grammy Awards or Academy Awards generate lots of online buzz on X. The online discussion allows users to participate in the success of celebrities who often post behind-the-scenes photo tweets or commentaries. On-set or in-concert tweets are further methods of celebrities enhancing their appeal, and level of fan interaction.

As of October 2025, social network X (formerly known as Twitter) was most popular in the United States, with an audience reach of approximately 99.04 million users. Japan ranked second, recording more than 71 million users on the platform. Global Twitter usage As of the second quarter of 2021, X/Twitter had 206 million monetizable daily active users worldwide. The most-followed Twitter accounts include figures such as Elon Musk, Justin Bieber and former U.S. president Barack Obama. X/Twitter and politics X/Twitter has become an increasingly relevant tool in domestic and international politics. The platform has become a way to promote policies and interact with citizens and other officials, and most world leaders and foreign ministries have an official Twitter account. Former U.S. president Donald Trump used to be a prolific Twitter user before the platform permanently suspended his account in January 2021. During an August 2018 survey, 61 percent of respondents stated that Trump's use of Twitter as President of the United States was inappropriate.

These are the key Twitter user statistics that you need to know.

Social network Twitter, founded in 2006, was taken over by tech-billionaire Elon Musk at the end of October 2022. As the company's new CEO, Musk reinstated numerous Twitter accounts that had previously been banned from the platform. Recently reinstated conservative author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson currently has 3.5 million followers on Twitter, after being suspended in mid 2022.

Deplatforming public figures Andrew Tate, a former kickboxing champion, had his Twitter account reinstated in November 2022 and has around 2.5 million followers. Tate had his Twitter account removed in 2017 due to controversial tweets about women, and in addition, found himself deplatformed from Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. American Rapper Kanye West, also known as Ye, had his Twitter account reinstated on November 20th, 2022, but his Twitter presence was short-lived after getting suspended again two weeks later for making anti-semitic remarks. Many of the formerly banned accounts were suspended pre-Musk takeover due to their violations of Twitter's conduct, spam, or misinformation policies. Kathy Griffin is a notable exception, as the comedian was banned from Twitter after changing her original Twitter name to "Elon Musk", which ended up getting her removed from the platform in November 2022.

Will Donald Trump return to Twitter? After Musk posted a Twitter poll asking followers if they believed the former president should be allowed to return to the network, the account of Donald Trump was restored. Of the 15 million votes, about 52 percent said Trump's account should be reinstated. It was permanently suspended in the days following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, due to the potential for inciting violence. The former president has since founded his own social network Truth Social and Trump's 87.8 million followers are yet to see him post on Twitter again.

The US has historically been the target country for Twitter since its launch in 2006. This is the full breakdown of Twitter users by country.

Elon Musk officially became the CEO of Twitter on October 27th, 2022. From that week, the follower counts of popular politicians in the United States began to dramatically change. During the week of October 24th to 31st, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas gained 75,977 new followers. Comparatively, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts lost 36,902 followers.

Let that sink in The acquisition of Twitter by tech billionaire Elon Musk was finalized on October 27th, 2022. Since then, Musk has made weekly headlines for various changes to the platform such as the “Twitter Blue” verification system, the cutting hundreds of jobs, installing beds in the office, and granting “general amnesty” for all banned accounts including those of former president Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Fluctuations in the number of Twitter followers of any one account are known to occur. These fluctuations are usually the result of significant social events in wider society or the mass removal of bots from the website and occur in short bursts. However, a clear and prolonged pattern emerged with high profile U.S. politicians in the weeks following the Musk takeover.

Republicans are the biggest winners Republican representatives have seen the largest follower gains in stark contrast to their Democratic and more left-leaning counterparts. It is difficult to know exactly why the post-Musk acquisition fluctuations have occurred, but news outlets have speculated a mass exodus of more liberally minded users, as well as an influx of right-wing bots. Additionally, Musk vocalized his support for the Republican party during the 2022 midterm elections and called for the prosecution of public health official, Anthony Fauci.

On November 2nd, Musk tweeted a picture of a sweater sold by the campaign of Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in which he had circled the price. This tweet gathered more than 400,000 thousand likes and prompted a response from Representative Ocasio-Cortez in which she criticized the Twitter CEO for his treatment of his employees.

Advertising makes up 89% of its total revenue and data licensing makes up about 11%.

With over 611 million monthly active users, building a huge Twitter following is not an easy task. These are the top 25 accounts with the most followers on Twitter right now.

UPDATE: Due to new Twitter API conditions changed by Elon Musk, now it's no longer free to use the Twitter (X) API and the pricing is 100 $/month in the hobby plan. So my automated ETL notebook stopped from updating new tweets to this dataset on May 13th 2023.

This dataset is was updated everyday with the addition of 1000 tweets/day containing any of the words "ChatGPT", "GPT3", or "GPT4", starting from the 3rd of April 2023. Everyday's tweets are uploaded 24-72h later, so the counter on tweets' likes, retweets, messages and impressions gets enough time to be relevant. Tweets are from any language selected randomly from all hours of the day. There are some basic filters applied trying to discard sensitive tweets and spam.

This dataset can be used for many different applications regarding to Data Analysis and Visualization but also NLP Sentiment Analysis techniques and more.

Consider upvoting this Dataset and the ETL scheduled Notebook providing new data everyday into it if you found them interesting, thanks! 🤗

Columns Description:

• tweet_id: Integer. unique identifier for each tweet. Older tweets have smaller IDs.

• tweet_created: Timestamp. Time of the tweet's creation.

• tweet_extracted: Timestamp. The UTC time when the ETL pipeline pulled the tweet and its metadata (likes count, retweets count, etc).

• text: String. The raw payload text from the tweet.

• lang: String. Short name for the Tweet text's language.

• user_id: Integer. Twitter's unique user id.

• user_name: String. The author's public name on Twitter.

• user_username: String. The author's Twitter account username (@example)

• user_location: String. The author's public location.

• user_description: String. The author's public profile's bio.

• user_created: Timestamp. Timestamp of user's Twitter account creation.

• user_followers_count: Integer. The number of followers of the author's account at the moment of the tweet extraction

• user_following_count: Integer. The number of followed accounts from the author's account at the moment of the Tweet extraction

• user_tweet_count: Integer. The number of Tweets that the author has published at the moment of the Tweet extraction.

• user_verified: Boolean. True if the user is verified (blue mark).

• source: The device/app used to publish the tweet (Apparently not working, all values are Nan so far).

• retweet_count: Integer. Number of retweets to the Tweet at the moment of the Tweet extraction.

• like_count: Integer. Number of Likes to the Tweet at the moment of the Tweet extraction.

• reply_count: Integer. Number of reply messages to the Tweet.

• impression_count: Integer. Number of times the Tweet has been seen at the moment of the Tweet extraction.

More info: Tweets API info definition: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dictionary/object-model/tweet Users API info definition: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dictionary/object-model/user

This is the breakdown of Twitter users by age group.

Das Ranking der beliebtesten Twitter-Accounts weltweit nach der Anzahl der Follower wird von Elon Musk angeführt. Im Februar 2025 folgten dem Twitter-CEO rund 218,2 Millionen Personen bei Twitter. Damit lag er vor dem ehemaligen US-Präsidenten Barack Obama und Weltfußballer Cristiano Ronaldo. Kennzahlen zu X (ehemalig Twitter) Der Mikrobloggingdienst Twitter verzeichnete nach einem Höchstwert im Jahr 2021 laut externer Quelle einen Umsatzrückgang im Jahr 2022 und 2023: zuletzt wurde ein Wert von rund 3,4 Milliarden US-Dollar erzielt. Der Verlust des Unternehmens belief sich im Jahr 2021 auf rund 221 Millionen US-Dollar. Die Zahl der monetarisierbaren täglich aktiven Nutzer belief sich im zweiten Quartal 2022 auf 237,8 Millionen. Seit der Übernahme von Twitter durch Elon Musk und dem anschließenden Rückzug des Unternehmens von der Börse müssen keine Umsatzzahlen mehr veröffentlicht werden. Twitter-Nutzung in Deutschland Gemessen an den Page Views hatte Twitter im Januar 2025 einen Marktanteil von rund 4,95 Prozent in Deutschland. Laut einer Umfrage wurde X (Twitter) hierzulande im Jahr 2024 von rund sieben Prozent wöchentlich genutzt.

The platform is male-dominated with 68.1% of all Twitter users being male. Just 31.9% of Twitter users are female.

Twitter is ranked as the 12h most popular social media site in the world. The platform currently has 611 million active monthly users.

The US has the largest number of Twitter users with over a 100 million users. They account for about 16.7% of all Twitter users worldwide.

One of the biggest advantages of Twitter is the speed at which information can be passed around. People use Twitter primarily to get news and for entertainment. This is the breakdown of why people use Twitter today.

The most liked tweet of all time was posted on American Actor Chadwick Boseman's Twitter account by his family members in August 2020 after his passing. As of January 2023, the post had seven million likes. Ranking second was a tweet by Elon Musk from April 2022, suggesting he would purchase Coca-Cola. Former U.S. President Barack Obama's 2017 tweet which stated "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion..." has gained four million likes and 1.4 million retweets. Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg had two top ranking tweets as of January 2023. Ranking forth, a tweet from Thunberg which was published on December 27th 2022, was a response to American-British media personality Andrew Tate. Tate tweeted Greta and requested an email address to which he could submit a list of his collection of cars and each one's corresponding emissions, resulting in Thunberg's comeback gaining almost four million likes within a matter of days.

Auf X (ehemals Twitter) verzeichnete Donald Trump im September 2025 mit Abstand am meisten Follower - rund *** Millionen Follower hatte der X-Account des US-Präsidenten. Auf der Video-Plattform TikTok erreichte er rund **** Millionen Follower. Der Account auf der von ihm selbst gegründeten Social-Media-Plattform Truth Social verzeichnete rund **** Millionen Abonnenten. US-Wahl 2024 Die Präsidentschaftswahlen in den USA fanden am 5. November 2024 statt. Zunächst kandidierte für die Demokraten der amtierende US-Präsident Joe Biden. Nach seinem Auftritt im ersten TV-Duell gegen Trump wurden jedoch Zweifel an seinem Gesundheitszustand laut. Vizepräsidentin Kamala Harris trat als neue Präsidentschaftskandidatin der Demokraten an. Donald Trump gewann schließlich die US-Wahl 2024 und ist der 47. US-Präsident. Trump und Social-Media-Sperrungen Nach dem Sturm seiner Anhänger auf das Kapitol in Washington Anfang 2021 wurde Donald Trump auf mehreren sozialen Netzwerken gesperrt. Vor dem US-Wahlkampf hob der Technologiekonzern Meta die Einschränkungen für Donald Trumps Konten auf Instagram und Facebook vollständig auf. Die Sperre von Trump auf X, ehemals Twitter, wurde bereits nach der Übernahme des Unternehmens durch Elon Musk im Jahr 2022 aufgehoben - dort gehört der Account von Donald Trump zu den beliebtesten Accounts weltweit. Als Reaktion auf die Sperrung seiner Social-Media-Konten gründete Donald Trump seine eigene Plattform Truth Social.

Cette statistique présente le classement des comptes Twitter (devenu X) les plus populaires dans le monde en août 2023, selon le nombre de followers. Il apparaît que deux ans après le rachat de Twitter par Elon Musk, Elon Musk était la personnalité la plus suivie sur le réseau social avec près de 140.5 millions de followers. En deuxième et troisième position, on retrouve respectivement Barack Obama (132,6 millions), suivi de Justin Bieber (112,7 millions). En 2023, il s’agit de près de 13,7 millions de personnes utilisaient Twitter en France. Les comptes les plus suivis sur cette plateforme ont également façonné l’économie mondiale et l’opinion publique. Twitter depuis le rachat d’Elon Musk PDG de Tesla, de SpaceX, et deuxième homme le plus riche au monde, Musk rachète Twitter pour 43 milliards de dollars le 14 avril 2022. L'annonce de son acquisition de Twitter a entraîné une hausse significative du cours de l'action, dépassant les 50 dollars en 2022. En parallèle, des entreprises telles que Coca-Cola, Unilever et Jeep ont mis fin à leurs partenariats publicitaires avec Twitter, ce qui a également eu un impact sur la dynamique boursière. Cette diminution est largement attribuée à la controverse croissante de la personnalité d'Elon Musk. En outre, la présence de fausses informations sur la plateforme a également contribué à la perte de confiance de ces entreprises et le changement de nom a également suscité des réactions mitigées chez les Américains. Dans les grands changements de la plateforme, Elon Musk a présenté le service premium « Twitter Blue » comme une stratégie visant à stimuler les revenus alors que les ventes de publicité de X connaissent un déclin. Cela souligne les défis auxquels X est confronté en cherchant à évoluer dans un environnement concurrentiel en constante mutation. Threads vs X : la concurrence dans le domaine des micro-blogs En parallèle de cette transition vers "X", l'année 2023 a été marquée par l'émergence de Threads par Instagram, offrant ainsi une alternative compétitive dans le domaine des microblogs. Cette plateforme offre des fonctionnalités semblables à Twitter. Threads autorise des messages allant jusqu'à 500 caractères, dépassant la contrainte des 280 caractères sur X/Twitter. Toutefois, les abonnés à Twitter Blue bénéficient quant à eux de la possibilité de rédiger des publications bien plus longues : on compte plus de 640 000 utilisateurs premium sur Twitter Blue. Les abonnements premium sur les plateformes permettent un accès plus large aux consommateurs tels que l’icône bleue de vérification officielle. En outre, Threads propose des vidéos de plus longue durée et permet la vérification gratuite des comptes via Instagram. Son intégration directe via Instagram facilite la création de profils pour les utilisateurs du réseau Meta. Avec près de 2 milliards d'utilisateurs actifs mensuels sur Instagram, il n'est pas surprenant que Threads ait rapidement enregistré 30 millions d'inscriptions dans les 24 heures suivant son lancement. Cependant, il est important de noter qu'une fois inscrit sur Threads, il peut être difficile de quitter la plateforme, car la suppression du compte entraîne également la désactivation du compte Instagram associé.