Here's How Many Followers Athletes Could Lose With Musk-Twitter Sale

The big news in the tech world is Elon Musk's impending purchase of Twitter, which could cause some accounts to lose followers, including a healthy drop for some athletes' accounts.

One of the things Musk has repeatedly talked about is getting rid of the bots that permeate the social networking site. Of course, this means that some people will see a considerable decline in followers,

Just how much? Well, fortunately, sports-betting site Pickswise did some digging and came up with some numbers.

They took the ten most followed athletes on Twitter and ran their accounts through the website FollowerAudit to get the following results:

(Credit: Pickswise)

First, try to get over the massive following of international soccer players and cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. Now let's so who could stand to lose the most followers.

Retired soccer players Kaka and Ronaldinho could stand to lose nearly 10% of their following if Twitter bots and fake accounts go the way of the dodo.

Some of these players could stand to lose tens of thousands of dollars when fake accounts are removed. That's bad news for them, but great news for advertisers who have been overpaying to access these people's Twitter followings

Of the top ten accounts, LeBron James stands to lose the fewest followers at just 3.58%. The only other basketball player on the list was Kevin Durant who could drop just shy of 7.5% of his follower count.

Who Else Will See A Drop?

But what about some other athletes that we're more familiar with stateside?

Well, PicksWise took a look at some of them too.

They found that the NFL is looking at dropping around 3.36% of its followers while Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Pat McAfee will lose between 6 and 8% of their followers.

Now, Maxim's sexiest woman in the world and golf-influencing mega-star Paige Spiranac could stand to lose most of anyone we've talked about. Ms. Spiranac could be looking at losing around 75,000 — more than 11% — of her following.

No biggie. Everyone knows Instagram is Paige's bread and butter.

Follow on Twitter: @Matt_Reigle