The flamboyant Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has broken the world record for the most-retweeted tweet.
Maezawa is a former rocker who entered the business world with a record-importing operation before founding the successful Zozo custom-fit clothing firm. In the last couple years he has made international headlines twice: firstly for paying a record-breaking $110.5 million for a Basquiat painting, then for becoming the first person to sign up for a ride on Elon Musk’s Starship.
Now Maezawa has scored more than 4.7 million retweets for a tweet he made Saturday.
ZOZOTOWN新春セールが史上最速で取扱高100億円を先ほど突破！！日頃の感謝を込め、僕個人から100名様に100万円【総額1億円のお年玉】を現金でプレゼントします。応募方法は、僕をフォローいただいた上、このツイートをRTするだけ。受付は1/7まで。当選者には僕から直接DMします！ #月に行くならお年玉 pic.twitter.com/cKQfPPbOI3
— 前澤友作 (@yousuck2020) January 5, 2019
The volume of retweets is perhaps not surprising. Maezawa, whose Twitter handle is the elegant @yousuck2020, promised to give 100 randomly-selected people a total of 100 million yen ($925,000) for following him and sharing his Zozo-promoting tweet.
The previous retweet record was held by a Nevada teenager named Carter Wilkinson, who asked fast-food chain Wendy’s how many retweets he would need to get free chicken nuggets for a year. Wendy’s replied “18 million,” and although Wilkinson only managed around 3.4 million retweets, Wendy’s gave him the nuggets anyway.
Before Wilkinson’s somewhat unhealthy achievement, Ellen DeGeneres held the retweet crown for her 2014 Oscars selfie with stars such as Meryl Streep and Brad Pitt.
Maezawa will no doubt be courting international attention again when he hops on board SpaceX’s trip round the Moon, somewhere around the 2023 mark. But at this rate, we’ll be hearing more from him sooner than that.
