Twitter

Japanese Billionaire Breezes Past Chicken Nugget Fiend To Claim Most-Retweeted Tweet Ever

The reign of Carter Wilkerson, an 18-year-old who famously amassed millions of retweets — the most of all time — in order to win an annual supply of chicken nuggets from Wendy’s, has come to an end.

Nearly two years after Wilkerson’s successful plea on Twitter, which has received 3.6 million retweets (and 991,000 ‘likes’) to date, he has been trumped by the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, Bloomberg reports. Maezawa’s two-day-old tweet serves to promote his online shopping business, Zozo, and also boasts an incentive for followers: Maezawa says he will pay 100 million yen (or roughly $920,000) to 100 randomly-selected people who follow him and retweet the missive.

To date, his tweet (below) has received 5.4 million retweets and 1.3 million likes. Maezawa’s following has also skyrocketed from roughly 400,000 before the sweepstakes to more than 5.6 million today.

Subscribe to get the latest creator news

Subscribe

After Maezawa and Wilkerson, the third most-retweeted post is a selfie shared by Ellen DeGeneres from the 2014 Oscar Awards, which features a star-studded lineup including Meryl Street, Brad Pitt, and Lupita Nyong’o.

This isn’t Maezawa’s first stunt involving boatloads of cash to muster up a flurry of headlines. The 43-year-old, who counts a net worth of $1.7 billion, according to Bloomberg, was also the first passenger to book a flight on the moon on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket, slated for 2023.

Share
Published by
Geoff Weiss

Recent Posts

TikTok’s 2025 economic impact included support for 410,000 jobs in the U.S.

In 2025, TikTok managed to put most of its regulatory issues in the U.S. to bed. As…

15 minutes ago

WME’s new Creator Labs team is launching YouTube channels for celebrities (and helping them monetize)

Update, Oct. 6: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the relationship between…

3 days ago

Slow Ventures is investing in creators’ “cults”

Slow Ventures cofounder Sam Lessin says his company is investing in cults. "I think we're…

3 days ago

Have you heard? MrBeast’s Shark Tank spot, Minecraft goes after Roblox, and a robo racoon gets us in the mood for spooky season

Each week, we handpick a selection of stories to give you a snapshot of trends,…

3 days ago

The last thing creators add, the first thing viewers notice: Why Adobe is introducing music, speech, and sound effect generation to Firefly

In 2023, Photoshop developer Adobe jumped into generative AI with its launch of Firefly. Firefly…

3 days ago

Live Nation is capitalizing on the creator economy with a new firm

Ticketmaster parent Live Nation is getting into the creator biz. The publicly traded multinational corp,…

4 days ago