Musk overtakes Obama as most followed Twitter account

WASHINGTON: Elon Musk has surpassed former US president Barack Obama as the most followed account on Twitter, five months after he bought the platform in a tumultuous takeover. Musk on Thursday had 133,084,560 Twitter followers, a nose ahead of Obama, who had 133,041,813.

The feat comes as the role of Twitter as a key platform for the exchange of news, ideas and PR messaging seems increasingly troubled. Musk has sharply cut the group´s payroll from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000 and has put his faith in drumming up paid subscribers to make the platform financially viable . 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.