Wealthy people tend to attract a lot of public attention. With this in mind, the Streams Charts team looked up at who of the richest people in the world is mentioned in Twitch chats most often. To do this, we scanned the broadcast logs for June and July and relied on the April billionaires’ ranking from Forbes when picking the businessmen for our list.
Elon Musk — 210K mentions in Twitch chats between June 1 and July 31
The eccentric billionaire Elon Musk is regularly featured in the news, and his brands Tesla and SpaceX are constantly discussed in the media worldwide. In the Twitch chat, Musk was also mentioned more than any other billionaire: over 210K times over the past two months.
Mentions of Musk on Twitch peaked in mid-July. We recorded about 30.1K messages on July 6-12. In the following two weeks, the number of mentions fell slightly, but still remained at around 29K. The main reason for this leap in popularity is the scandal surrounding Musk’s purchase of Twitter. In early July, the billionaire suddenly decided to back out of a $44 billion deal, citing unreliable statistics on the number of spam accounts. After this statement, the company's shares fell, and Twitter management announced that it was going to sue Musk. It should be noted that the hype about this subsided and the number of mentions of Musk dropped to the previous level and even below by the end of July.
We also analyzed the context of the messages in which Elon Musk was mentioned. As it turned out, Elon Musk was most often remembered by Twitch users in the context of his failed deal with Twitter (almost 10K messages).
The second most mentioned word in messages with Musk was BatChest emote (4.2K messages). This is a popular emoji on Twitch that is often used to show false surprise or excitement or to pretend to be excited about nerdy things. It seems that not all Twitch users like Musk's smart arguments about the future of humanity and the colonization of Mars. By the way, the continuation of the list of popular relation unique words looks like: Tesla, Mars, money, and Bezos.
As for the mentions of the word Tesla, these could be triggered by the company’s financial report for Q2 2022, in which Musk reported a doubling of profits. In the same quarter, Tesla management announced the sale of 75% of the company's bitcoins for a total of $936M.
The names of Musk and Bezos being often found next to one another in user messages is not surprising, because both billionaires are often compared to each other. For example, ordinary people regularly compare billionaires' fortune, the success of their brands, etc.
Jeff Bezos — 82.4K mentions
Second most mentioned billionaire is Jeff Bezos, the founder of the Internet company Amazon, who was mentioned more than 82K in Twitch chats over two months. Most often, Bezos was mentioned in the second half of July. At the peak, users left almost 11.5K messages with his name in chats.
Note that the anniversary of Bezos's flight into space falls within this period of time. In July 2021, the billionaire made a small flight on the New Shepard suborbital vehicle, created by his company Blue Origin. Another rather newsmaker was Bezos' public criticism of US President Joe Biden due to inflation in the country. Finally, the number of mentions of Bezos has grown simply because many business publications summarize the results of the half-year in July (by releasing the updated business ratings and so on).
Bill Gates — 19.8K mentions
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the third most mentioned billionaire on Twitch. In the period for June-July 2022, his name was written in chat rooms more than 19.8K times. It should be noted that, unlike Musk and Bezos, there were no anomalous leaps in the number of mentions of Gates. His name was contained in 1.5K-2.5K messages a week. It is noteworthy that the peaks usually occurred in the middle of the month, while the minimum values were recorded precisely on the boundary dates (i.e., at the beginning/end of the month).
Sergey Brin — 10.3K mentions
Closing our top of the most mentioned billionaires on Twitch is the American programmer and Internet entrepreneur Sergey Brin, who, along with Larry Page, is the co-founder of Google. In two months, the number of mentions of Brin reached 10.3K messages. Interestingly, his colleague Larry Page was also part of our chat study, but he was mentioned only 55 times.
The reason for the leap in Brin's popularity could be the news of his divorce from his wife Nicole Shanahan. In July, The Wall Street Journal reported that she had a brief affair with Elon Musk, yet the latter denied this information.
We categorized the rest of the top 10 billionaires as Other, as they had too few mentions compared to those in the top 4: from a few hundred to a few dozen posts. As such, the second part of our ranking included were Bernard Arnault, Warren Buffett, Mukesh Ambani, Steve Ballmer, Larry Page, and Larry Ellison.
If we draw parallels between this and our past chat studies, then we must admit that transfers of popular football players are much more discussed on Twitch compared to the billionaires. Well, there’s always an option for Musk, Bezos, and others to increase their popularity by acquiring a football club or two.