Billionaires Don’t Care For Twitter, Forbes Survey Finds—And That’s Before Musk Took Over (2024)

Forbes surveyed billionaires on their favorite social media apps and found the one that’s their favorite. Hint: It’s not Twitter.

Elon Musk’s first two weeks at Twitter have been nothing if not controversial. The real-time, heavy-handed takeover by the Tesla and SpaceX CEO—and world’s richest person—has unleashed a flurry of interest and activity on the app, including from many of Musk’s fellow billionaires.

Investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who initially declared his excitement for the Musk “era,” took to Twitter on Thursday to criticize changes to the app’s verification and impersonation policies, one of Musk’s first big moves as CEO (or as Musk calls it, “Chief Twit”). Switching to a system where anyone can purchase official blue check verification, previously reserved for public figures and other official accounts, for $8 a month ”killed the most valuable part of Twitter,” Cuban wrote in a tweet. The Shark Tank billionaire has spent the past week tweeting feedback and suggestions to Musk, sometimes garnering responses. (On Friday, Twitter appeared to stop selling access to blue check verification following chaos caused by impersonator accounts.)

“It’s Elon’s company. He gets to do with it what he wants. If it works, it works. If not, not,” Cuban told Forbes recently. “He is doing what entrepreneurs do. He is trying to figure everything out,” said the Shark Tank judge, who with some 8.8 million followers, is one of Twitter’s most popular billionaires.

Others are more alarmed by Musk’s latest moves. Billionaire and early Twitter investor Chris Sacca published a Twitter thread on Monday, chastising Musk’s inner circle for not standing up to him more, conceding that he himself was hesitant to speak out because he would like to do business with Tesla. “Elon’s mind is perhaps the greatest in history for pushing those [batteries and motors and rocket] ideas and their execution forward. But this sh-t ain’t that,” Sacca said.

Musk was showered with praise—from moguls ranging from Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell to private equity tycoon Orlando Bravo–when he first bought Twitter. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who has made millions trading Twitter stock since the summer, declared Twitter “a great platform” and Elon Musk “the perfect one for that company” during Forbes’ inaugural Iconoclast Summit on November 3.

Despite the controversy, Musk has continued to rack up followers on his new app. Up to 115.3 million followers from 99.5 million in June, Musk has overtaken singer and Fenty Beauty founder Rihanna as the billionaire with the most followers on the platform (Rihanna has 107 million followers). He’s the second most followed person on the app after former president Barack Obama (113.3 million), according to Socialtracker.

THE BILLIONAIRES WITH THE BIGGEST SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWINGS

^{Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk both win on their own platforms. Meanwhile, reality TV star turned shapewear billionaire Kim Kardashian is the most popular on both Instagram and TikTok.}

Considering the level of engagement Musk’s tenure has drawn among this group (he claims Twitter usage is at an all-time-high), it may be surprising to learn that billionaires generally don’t care much for Twitter. A Forbes survey of 65 of the world’s wealthiest people, which was done before Musk completed his purchase of the app at the end of October, found just 12.6% claimed to have accounts on the platform.

The response was part of a broader apathy toward social media among billionaires. Nearly half (46.8%) of those surveyed said they have no social media accounts at all. Of those who did report being active online, the most popular landing place was LinkedIn, which 25.8% of surveyed billionaires said they used, followed by photo-sharing app Instagram (22.6%) and Facebook (21.6%). At the bottom of the pile were Chinese photo-sharing app WeChat (4.8%), Whatsapp (3.2%) and TikTok (3.2%).

Dr. Sarah Stanley Fallaw, a psychologist who has spent years studying the habits of the wealthy and now runs the Georgia-based consultancy DataPoints, said her own research identified a similar trend. High net worth individuals generally “spend more time reading, more time with family and exercising,” says Fallaw. “They don’t have a lot of time for things like social media and are able to put their hours and resources toward things that are beneficial toward themselves.”

Harry Stine can attest. The richest man in Iowa, Stine built the agriculture giant Stine Seeds, the largest private seed company in the world and the source of Stine’s estimated $8.2 billion fortune. “[I] simply have no interest in that sort of thing,” Stine told Forbes in a recent email, noting that he signed up for the professional networking platform LinkedIn “many years ago” but never uses it and couldn’t even if he wanted to (because, he says, he’s forgotten his password; apparently he doesn’t know that passwords can be reset).

Of course there are plenty of examples of billionaires who are very active online and use social media to bolster both their personal brands and their business. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has a 36 million-person following on LinkedIn (more than any other billionaire), where his account posts frequently about his work with charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Billionaire entrepreneur and reality television star Kim Kardashian has 333 million followers on Instagram and 14.2 million across two profiles on TikTok, more than any other billionaire on each platform.

Will a Musk-owned Twitter bring in more billionaires or drive them further away? Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney, who says Twitter is the only social media platform he uses, told Forbes last week that he is waiting to see if the app “gets better or worse as a user.”

Another billionaire, who asked to remain anonymous, said they only use Twitter when sent a tweet “because of its significance for public policy or our foundation programs” but that the platform could be useful if moderated well. “I acknowledge that, properly edited, there is valuable information there among the chaff of Musky/Trumped up disinformation.”

Even the chronically offline Stine has an opinion: “It should be an improvement,” he said of Musk’s Twitter leadership. But it won’t be enough to get him to sign on.

MORE FROM FORBES

MORE FROM FORBESThe Untold Story Behind Emax, The Cryptocurrency Kim Kardashian Got Busted For HypingBy John HyattMORE FROM FORBESThe Red Flags On FTX We All Seemed To MissBy Brandon KochkodinMORE FROM FORBESThe Heiresses, The Oilmen, And The $200 Million Bonus BattleBy Christopher Helman