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THE WORLD’S TOP 10 MOST POPULAR PEOPLE ON X IN 2026

The world’s top 10 most popular people on X in 2026.

The top 10 most-followed people on X in 2026.

The top 10 accounts on X in 2026.

The most famous celebrities, leaders, influencers, creators and stars on X in 2026.

Written by Mau, a X Advertising Specialist at eDigital.

THE WORLD’S TOP 10 MOST POPULAR PEOPLE ON X IN 2026

Before you start checking these world’s top 10 most-followed people on X, let me tell you something you might find hard to admit:

X is mugging you in broad daylight 🔫 while you thank them for the privilege.

X algorithm shows your “viral” content to roughly the same audience who’d notice if you screamed to your office printer: Elon from the branding team who does not even know your name. 😵

You own nothing 🤡 on your X account.

You’re renting followers from landlords who charge you extra just to talk to your audience.

It’s like building a mansion on rented land: expensive, temporary, and the landlord can bulldoze it whenever they update their “community guidelines”. 🏠💥

Meanwhile, Musk is swimming in a pool filled with your ad spend. 🏊‍♂️💰

Your current situation:

❌ Zero follower data ownership 📊❌
❌ Organic reach = no-one watching! 🕵️‍♂️
❌ Ad costs rising faster than your therapy bills 📈💀
❌ Followers “export” button? Pure fantasy 🦄

The intervention your marketing needs:

✅ Stop being X’s favourite ATM 🏧❌
✅ Own your audience 👑
✅ Lower your customer acquisition costs 💰
✅ Build marketing systems that own and control 🤖❤️

Throwing money at X ads hoping for results is expensive self-harm with the worse ROI. 🔥

Ready to break up with X’s abuse?

Book a strategy session and learn to build digital marketing that works for you, not against your bank account. 🚀

Stop renting your success. Start owning it.

Let’s craft the best digital marketing plan and social media strategy that boosts sales and customer lifetime value.

THE WORLD’S TOP 10 MOST POPULAR PEOPLE ON X IN 2026

The world’s top 10 most popular X accounts in 2026.

Because nothing says “cutting-edge marketing strategy” like obsessing over the same celebrities everyone’s been following since Twitter was still called Twitter and not the digital dumpster fire it has gloriously evolved into!

Why should marketers care about the world’s top 10 most-followed people on X?

Because your CMO read something on LinkedIn about “top 10 X influencers“ while pooping, and now you need to pretend these accounts matter to your brand that sells industrial-strength toilet bowl cleaners to Midwestern hardware stores.

Just imagine the possibilities!

Your brand could spend $50,000 on a sponsored post from a billionaire who will absolutely never see your email! Or perhaps you could craft an entire “engagement strategy” around celebrities who have teams of 21-year-olds running their accounts while they lounge on yachts completely unaware of your existence!

Most views today: this year’s top 10 TikTok marketing trends

Next: the top 20 most popular people on X

10. Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is one of the top 10 most popular people on X with 79+ million followers.

@taylorswift13

Popular today: the best 10 Taylor Swift wallpaper HD photos and images for laptop

Taylor Swift is the billionaire diary-writer who turned breakups into a global empire.

Taylor Swift is what happens when you give a resentful ex a guitar, a marketing team (not better than us), and the supernatural ability to turn every romantic disappointment into a chart-topping anthem.

Taylor is basically the world’s most successful professional oversharer, who managed to convince millions of people that her dating life is somehow their business and they’re obsessed with it.

Starting as a country sweetheart with curly hair and a penchant for writing songs about boys who done her wrong, Swift has evolved into a pop culture deity who can literally crash Ticketmaster, influence elections, and make grown adults hug each other at football games.

She’s the only female who can release the same album twice, call it “Taylor’s Version,” and somehow make it an act of feminist rebellion.

Her absolutely bonkers private jet usage, which turned her into climate activists’ number one public enemy. Related: the best sustainability hashtags for TikTok

In 2022, it was revealed that Taylor’s private jet took 170 flights in just a few months, racking up more carbon emissions than most people produce in their entire lives.

Popular today: the best 10 Taylor Swift wallpaper HD photos and images for laptop

That woman who sings about loving Mother Earth apparently loves it best from 40,000 feet above it.

Her jet was reportedly taking 13-minute flights—literally shorter than some of her songs.

People were furious (not me) that while they’re being told to use paper straws and bike to work, Taylor’s out here treating her private jet like an Uber for trips that could’ve been a car ride.

Her team’s defense that she “loans out” the jet to others only made it worse.

But hey, at least she wrote a song about it… probably.

Marketers are reading the top 10 Gen Z characteristics every marketer should know.

9. Katy Perry

Katy Perry is one of the top 10 most popular people on X with 85+ million followers.

@katyperry

Katy Perry is the female mood ring who went from gospel to gay rights to… whatever this is.Katy Perry is what happens when s

Katy Perry is what happens when someone decides their entire personality should be based on whatever’s trending on Pinterest at any given moment.

Perry is the pop star equivalent of that friend who reinvents themselves every semester—one day she’s a wholesome pastor’s daughter, the next she’s kissing girls, licking them and liking it, then suddenly she’s a woke activist with a pixie cut, and now she’s… a judge on American Idol wearing fruit costumes?

Katy has built her career on being aggressively quirky in a way that feels both calculated and utterly chaotic. She’s the woman who made whipped cream bras a thing, turned her boobs into literal weapons in music videos, and somehow convinced the world that “Roar” was an empowerment anthem and not just expensive karaoke.

Katy Perry’s absolutely bizarre obsession with trying to make nice with Taylor Swift after their years-long feud, culminating in the most awkward peace offering in celebrity history. But the real fury came from her tone-deaf attempts at political activism and “woke” reinvention around 2017-2018.

Perry’s disastrous “Witness” era where she tried to rebrand as a deep, socially conscious artist while simultaneously doing things like livestreaming herself sleeping and having therapy sessions. The public was not having her sudden transformation from the woman who made “California Gurls” into some kind of political philosopher.

Katy’s awkward attempts at discussing privilege and social justice felt so forced and performative that even her fans were like “Maybe just stick to the fruit costumes, babe.”

The woman went from “I kissed a girl” to “I’m spiritually woke now” faster than you can say “cultural appropriation lawsuit.”

In 2013, Katy worked with Dell to highlight their technology’s ability to support creative professionals, especially in music and entertainment. Related: the new Dell logo PNG.

Editor’s pick: the world’s top 25 most popular people on TikTok

8. NASA

NASA is one of the top 10  most popular accounts on X with 90+ million followers.

@NASA

NASA is a group of nerds who somehow convinced everyone to burn their tax-paying dollars to fund their extremely expensive hobby and surely some are jealous about it.

NASA is basically what happens when you give a bunch of rocket scientists an unlimited credit card and tell them to “aim for the stars, literally.”

These are the people who can calculate the exact trajectory needed to land a robot on Mars, but somehow can’t figure out how to build a space toilet that doesn’t cost $28 million.

NASA has been America’s premier organisation for shooting very expensive things and occasionally bringing them back.

They’ve mastered the art of turning taxpayer money into spectacular explosions and the occasional “oops, we lost another Mars lander.”

NASA‘s cozy relationship with SpaceX and Elon Musk’s companies, which has some folks absolutely livid. Critics are fuming that NASA is essentially subsidising the world’s richest man’s personal space obsession while he simultaneously uses his other companies to influence politics and social media.

NASA has awarded SpaceX billions in contracts (including $2.9 billion for the moon lander), leading to accusations that they’re basically funding Musk’s Mars vacation home while he tweets controversial takes and plays puppet master with global communications.

NASA spent decades perfecting the art of bureaucratic space travel, only to hand over the keys to a guy who names his rockets after Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references and launches cars into orbit “for the memes.”

Still, they did give us Tang and velcro, so… thanks for that, space nerds.

NASA is also one of the top 10 most popular brands on Instagram

7. Justin Bieber

Justin Bieber is one of the top 10 most-followed people on X with 90+ million followers.

@justinbieber

What can we say about the pretty Canadian boy?

There you go…

Justin Bieber is the Canadian pop singer who somehow transformed from a YouTube cherub into a walking tabloid headline, proving that puberty can be a contact sport. The former teen heartthrob has spent the last decade ping-ponging between chart-topping hits and cringe-worthy controversies like a caffeinated pinball.

Bieber is a regular attendee of the US Open tennis tournament. Related: the new US Open logo PNG.

Bieber’s 2014 DUI arrest in Miami Beach, where the 19-year-old was caught drag racing a rented yellow Lamborghini while allegedly under the influence. The incident became a perfect storm of entitled celebrity behaviour, complete with resisting arrest and an expired license, cementing his reputation as pop music’s most spectacular cautionary tale about fame hitting before brain development is complete.

These days, the Justin has supposedly mellowed into a married man and father, though he still occasionally battles paparazzi like he’s defending his honour in a medieval joust.

Whether Bieber is a reformed bad boy or just better at hiding his chaos remains pop culture’s most enduring mystery.

Justin Bieber’s fans also checked some of the world’s top 25 most-followed TikTok celebrities

The top 10 most-followed people on X represent the pinnacle of humanity’s achievements – mostly politicians, musicians, athletes, and tech bros who accidentally bought social media platforms.

Study their tweets with the dedication of ancient scholars! What profound wisdom might you glean from a pop star posting “can’t wait for you guys to see what’s next 👀” or a sports legend tweeting “big game today 🔥”?

Remember: nothing impresses clients like saying “According to Elon Musk’s latest tweet…” in a strategy presentation. It shows you’re “tapped in” to “the conversation” happening on a platform where the conversation is mostly bots arguing with other bots.

Check out this list to finally answer the question nobody asked:

“How can we be more like these completely unreachable famous people who would block our brand account if we dared to mention them?”

6. Rihanna

Rihanna is one of the top 10 most-followed people on X with 96+ million followers.

@rihanna

Rihanna is the Barbadian singer and business mogul who became too rich to care about making great music

Rihanna is what happens when someone is so effortlessly cool that they can literally stop doing the thing that made them famous and somehow become even more successful.

Rihanna is the woman who went from “Umbrella, ella, ella” to “Fenty Beauty, dollar, dollar” and made everyone realise that maybe the real hits were the makeup palettes we bought along the way.

While other pop stars are desperately chasing trends, Rihanna is casually making lingerie that actually fits real human bodies. She’s turned procrastination into an art form—promising new music for years while simultaneously becoming richer than most small countries.

Rihanna – who built her brand on inclusivity and empowerment – was suddenly taking money from a regime (Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund) notorious for women’s rights violations and, you know, that whole Jamal Khashoggi situation.

Fans felt betrayed that their inclusive queen was essentially getting into bed with a government that represents everything her brand supposedly stands against.

Critics on X pointed out the glaring hypocrisy of preaching female empowerment while partnering with a country (Saudi Arabia) where women couldn’t even drive until 2018.

Popular this month: the top 25 British people on Instagram

Next: the top 20 most popular people on X

5. Cristiano Ronaldo

Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the top 10 most popular people on X with 106+ million followers.

@Cristiano

Born in Madera Island, Portugal, Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the top 25 sports athletes on Instagram

CR7: where narcissism meets athletic genius, and somehow both win.

Cristiano Ronaldo is the Portuguese goal-scoring machine who treats his abs like a Renaissance sculpture and his ego like a national treasure.

Cristiano is the man who turned shirtless celebrations into an art form has spent two decades proving that confidence isn’t just a personality trait—it’s a lifestyle choice that requires daily maintenance and a full-time social media team.

Ronaldo’s explosive November 2022 interview with Piers Morgan, where he torched Manchester United while the World Cup was about to begin. Cristiano declared he felt “betrayed” by the club and showed zero respect for manager Erik ten Hag, essentially burning every bridge at Old Trafford in spectacular fashion. The interview was so much fun that Manchester United immediately cut ties with Ronaldo, making it the most expensive career suicide note in football history.

Now Cristiano is loving the heat of Saudi Arabia, still flexing at 40 and probably planning his next documentary about how misunderstood he is.

On the 31st December 2022, Ronaldo signed a new contract with Al Nassr F.C. a Saudi Arabian football club based in Riyadh, right after a controversial exit (second spell) from Manchester United  and an extraordinary time at Real Madrid and Juventus.

Cristiano Ronaldo knows the power of celebrity branding and has successfully launched different businesses including hotels (Pertana CR7), Health & fitness app (7egent), Gym (CR7 Crunch fitness), eyewear, underwear, shoes (footwear) and fashion. Cristiano has collaborated with and been the model for global marketing campaigns and brands including Nike, Insparya (haircare), Herbalife Nutrition, Dazn (sports app), Clear (haircare), SixPad (fitness gear), Free Fire (Gaming app), LiveScore, Talabat (Food and grocery delivery app) and Samsonite’s brand: American Tourister.

Ronaldo’s fans on X are using some of the top 10 most popular fitness apps.

Cristiano Ronaldo is also also famous for publicly saying that he is a better player than Lionel Messi (only his ego would believe it)

CR7 is one of the top 10 most-followed footballers on Instagram and the most popular sports athlete on X.

⭐️  Marketers are using the new X logo PNG to promote their X accounts on other digital assets.

4. Narendra Modi

Narendra Modi is one of the top 10 most-followed people on X with 106+ million followers.

@narendramodi

Narendra Modi is the tea-seller-turned-prime-minister who turned India into his personal brand.

Narendra Modi is what happens when you give a former tea vendor a marketing degree, a really good social media team, and the keys to the world’s largest democracy.

Narendra is basically India’s answer to a lifestyle influencer, except instead of selling skincare routines, he’s selling nationalism with a side of economic reform and a hefty dose of Hindu pride.

Born into humble beginnings (which he mentions roughly every 38 seconds), Modi has transformed himself into India’s most polarising figure since… well, probably ever.

Modi is the man who can inaugurate a statue taller than the Statue of Liberty while simultaneously making demonetisation sound like a brilliant idea. Narendra’s superpower is turning every policy announcement into a primetime spectacle and making his supporters believe that criticizing him is basically treason.

Modi’s government’s handling of the farmers’ protests in 2020-2021, which turned into a year-long nightmare that had everyone from Rihanna to Greta Thunberg tweeting about Indian agriculture policy. When Modi’s government passed farm laws that farmers said would destroy their livelihoods, hundreds of thousands of protesters camped out on Delhi’s borders in what became the largest protest in human history.

The public fury reached nuclear levels when Narendra responded with internet shutdowns, water cannons in freezing weather, and tear gas against peaceful protesters—many of them elderly Sikh farmers.

The optics were terrible: the man who claims to represent “common people” was literally using force against farmers, while his party members called them “terrorists” and “anti-nationals.”

International pressure mounted, celebrities got involved, and suddenly the whole world was watching India’s democracy implode in real-time.

Modi eventually had to repeal all three laws, making it look like the world’s most expensive government U-turn.

Modi’s fans in India are also using some of the top 25 yoga hashtags on Instagram

Next: the top 20 most popular people on X

3. realDonaldTrump

Donald Trump is one of the top 10 most-followed people on X with 111+ million followers.

@realDonaldTrump

Trump’s X account was banned in Jan 2021 and restored in Jan 2023.

Donald Trump is the Reality TV Star who became President and won’t stop reminding everyone about it.

Donald Trump is what happens when you give a New York real estate mogul with a Twitter addiction the nuclear codes and tell him “good luck.” He’s basically that uncle at Sunday’s lunch who has opinions about everything, except this uncle somehow convinced 70+ million Americans that his dinner table rants were presidential material.

Born into wealth and armed with an industrial-strength spray tan, Trump has spent decades perfecting the art of turning controversy into currency. He’s the man who made “You’re fired!” a catchphrase, turned politics into professional wrestling, and somehow made golden toilets seem like a reasonable life choice. His superpower is making people forget what they were mad about yesterday by saying something even more outrageous today.

Popular this month: this year’s best 10 Donald Trump AI photos

Trump’s role in the January 6th Capitol insurrection, which had Americans watching their own government building get stormed like it was a particularly unhinged episode of The Real Housewives. After months of claiming the 2020 election was “stolen” (without evidence), Trump held a rally where he told supporters to “fight like hell” and march to the Capitol.

What followed was the most surreal day in modern American history: people in Viking helmets sitting in the Senate chamber, Confederate flags waving through the halls for the first time since the Civil War, and lawmakers literally hiding under desks. The fury was bipartisan and immediate, even some Republicans were like “Okay, this is too much, even for us.”

Trump became the first president to be impeached twice, and the whole thing made Americans realise that democracy is apparently way more fragile than anyone thought.

The man turned a peaceful transfer of power into a WWE storyline, and somehow it worked for his base.

Marketers are reading this year’s top 10 TikTok marketing trends

You will enjoy watching some of the world’s top 10 most popular protest art

2. Barack Obama

Barack Obama is one of the top 10 most popular people on X with 119+ million followers.

@BarackObama

Related reading: the best Mother’s Day marketing campaign ideas and examples – How to make a video go viral

Barack Obama is the smooth-talking former president who somehow managed to be both the most beloved and most scrutinized leader in modern history, proving that even eloquence and Nobel Peace Prizes can’t save you from 24/7 cable news cycles.

The man who turned “Yes We Can” into a national slogan spent eight years trying to healthcare reform while dodging everything from birther conspiracies to fashion police.

Listen to this: He wore a beige suit to a press conference about ISIS.

The audacity!

Reporters and pundits spent days debating whether the light-colored fabric was appropriate for discussing terrorism, as if the fate of democracy hung in the balance of his wardrobe choices.

This followed Barack’s earlier crime against humanity: Obama ordered Dijon mustard on a hamburger in 2009 which apparently marked him as dangerously elitist in the eyes of condiment purists.

In hindsight, if your biggest scandal involves haute couture and fancy mustard, you probably had a pretty solid presidency.

Obama: the president who made looking presidential look effortless, even when critics were desperately grasping at fashion straws.

Barack Obama is a politician and lawyer who served as the 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Obama was the first African American to be the President of the U.S.A. Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School.

Obama is a regular attendee of the US Open tennis tournament. Related: the new US Open logo PNG.

Need X marketing strategy support? We can offer you one of the best digital marketing strategy workshops to improve your X marketing.

Most views today: how to write the best social media plan and template

X users also checked out some of the top 10 most-followed people TikTok – ranking list.

1. Elon Musk

Elon Musk is the top 10 most popular people on X with 237+ million followers.

@elonmusk

Elon Musk is the South African-born billionaire who somehow convinced the world that making rockets, electric cars, and tweeting at 3 AM are all part of the same job description.

Musk is the man who turned “disruption” into a personal brand spent decades building Tesla and SpaceX while simultaneously perfecting the art of saying absolutely anything that pops into his head, consequences be damned.

Elon’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, which he promptly rebranded to “X” because apparently even social media platforms should have midlife crises.

Musk gutted the company’s content moderation team from 8,000 employees to under 1,500, turned verification into a pay-to-play scheme, and transformed the platform into a free-speech experiment that resembled more of a digital Wild West saloon.

The cherry on top?

His company started responding to press inquiries with poop emojis.

💩

I am not joking.

More recently, Musk’s January 2025 salute at Trump’s inauguration was widely interpreted as resembling a Nazi salute, sparking international condemnation.

Musk: the man who proved you can literally buy a social media platform and still somehow make it all about you.

Elon Musk fans are using the new X logo PNG and the new Tesla logo PNG.

Elon Reeve Musk is an business magnate, technology entrepreneur, owner of X and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

Most viewed this week: This year’s top 10 fastest-growing industries – ranking list

The top 10 most popular people on X have the power to boost a brand’s visibility to a targeted audience. They can also offer legitimacy by functioning as social proof.

These top 10 popular people on X are literally billionaires who pay other people to manage their social media.

Do not create strategy decks based on content written by hired 23-year-old social media managers who are themselves referencing OTHER marketing strategy decks.

It’s a perfect circle of delusion: marketers studying celebrities who hire marketers who study marketing trends created by marketers studying celebrities. This is the equivalent of a dog chasing its own tail while wearing a $6,000 Brioni suit and calling it “thought leadership.”

The cherry on top?

These same marketers will then charge clients thousands to “leverage celebrity X strategy insights” which basically translates to “we’ll copy whatever Rihanna’s intern posted last Tuesday but make it about your discount mattress store.” And somewhere, a CMO is nodding vigorously while thinking they’ve cracked the X’s algorithm code.

The X ecosystem: where people with marketing degrees study people who pay people with marketing degrees to tweet for them.

It’s beautiful, really.

Next: the top 20 most popular people on X

Have your say! 🗣

💬 Users’ comments about this exclusive list of the top 10 most-followed people on X:

• “Marketers are hunting for the top 10 most-followed people on X like it’s a magic spell for instant sales and a fat pay raise 💼✨ stalking celebs on X won’t fix your KPI, but hey, nice try! 📉🤡 Aaron McAllister
  

Send us your comment and get your opinion published!

🎬 Conclusion

Final note: Are your marketing costs through the roof? 🚀💸

If your customer acquisition costs are climbing faster than a startup founder’s ego 📈😎 (post‑IPO champagne still in hand 🍾), and you’re hooked on paid ads like a reality TV star or a Tinder date who keeps accepting your dinner invites 🍝🍷 but never calls you back 📵💔…

If that sounds like you 👀👂🏼, you should definitely contact us 🧠💬📞

Our exclusive digital marketing strategy workshops will mercilessly dissect your marketing🔥 💀, expose all the weak spots and show you how to ditch the algorithm chokehold to build a marketing engine you actually own. 🔧🚀

We’ll shake up your team’s thinking 🧠⚡, drop fresh ideas 💡🍉, and turn your marketing from “meh” 😐 to a money-making machine. 🤑💸

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We offer:

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Ready to start marketing like a boss? Let’s talk

THE TOP 10 MOST-FOLLOWED PEOPLE ON X IN 2026

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