Beats Sallu and Mr. Perfectionist, but behind the original Don.
By The American Bazaar Staff
BANGALORE: They call him King Khan because of how he’s dominated the Indian box office, awards, and the hearts of fans for more than 20 years, but now Shah Rukh Khan can call himself the King Khan of Twitter, too.
SRK hit eight million followers on Twitter, and now has the biggest fan-base of all the major Khans on Twitter, beating out his closest competition, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan. Sallu Bhai and Mr. Perfectionist each have between 7.1 and 7.2 million fans on the popular social network, meaning that Shah Rukh Khan has almost one million more fans than each of them.
The news of Khan hitting the eight million mark was so momentous on Twitter, that the hash-tag #SRK8Million went viral.
Khan himself addressed having reached the huge benchmark, tweeting “They say that
the heart beats & u can hear it, that’s Biology. But wot is the song I hear with the beat? I believe it’s all if u. Thanx 8Mil” early on Tuesday morning.
This is just the latest in a recent string of off-screen success for Shah Rukh Khan, who is on quite a hot streak. In the span of about a month, his IPL team won the championship for the second year in a row, he was voted the most popular father in all of India, and found to be the second-richest actor in the entire world, with a net worth of around $500 million.
Still, Khan couldn’t match the Twitter power of Amitabh Bachchan, who still commands the biggest follower base in all of Bollywood – 9.1 million. That’s a huge number but, if there’s one Indian celebrity who can rise to the challenge and supplant the Bollywood legend at the top spot, it’s Khan.
Sounds like the premise of a good movie – the old Don and the new Don battle for control of the Indian Twitter-verse.