Elon Musk's X follower count bloated by millions of new, inactive accounts

> Musk has recently claimed that X now has more than 540 million "monthly users." If accurate, that means more than 25 percent of accounts on the platform follow Musk.

This is an obviously bad conclusion: if X and Mashable used the same conditions to consider someone an active user (thus, counted as "monthly user" or "active"), we'd expect only around 50% of Musk's followers to be active in a given month, if that.

That puts the figure Musk followers contribute to monthly active users at 12%.

The two definitions are certainly different, and X has better access to data, but I would expect majority of the X accounts to be pretty much inactive (heck, I created one back in the early Twitter days and only ever tweeted less than 10 times: though I was not following Musk, but I can imagine a bunch of accounts like mine who did). Also, I don't see a reason to underestimate lurkers: a bunch of changes recently (eg. visibility restricted to account holders, since retracted) may have pushed some to create lurker accounts.

"If accurate, that means more than 25 percent of accounts on the platform follow Musk."

Remember Tom from MySpace? I wonder what percentage of accounts followed him...

Maybe Musk is using the same strat for success...