Who was the first Twitter user to reach one million followers?

Ashton Kutcher was the first Twitter user to reach one million followers. He crossed the milestone on April 16, 2009, during a highly publicized race with CNN.

Kutcher’s account, @aplusk, became a major early example of celebrity influence on Twitter. His competition with CNN was framed as the site’s “Million followers contest,” and Kutcher ultimately reached the target first. The event helped show that an individual celebrity could attract an audience comparable to a major media organization.

The question is sometimes muddled because Lady Gaga, Barack Obama, and Britney Spears later became much larger Twitter accounts. Lady Gaga, in particular, was one of the platform’s most-followed users during Twitter’s rapid growth in the early 2010s, but she was not the first person to reach one million followers.

Kutcher’s milestone came only a few years after Twitter launched, when follower counts were still relatively small and a million followers was an exceptional benchmark.