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Japanese billionaire businessman takes crown for most retweeted tweet

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A Japanese fashion billionaire has taken the crown for the most retweeted tweet of all time after receiving 4.5m retweets for a message he posted on the micro-blogging site on 5 January.

Yusaku Maezawa, who founded Japanese online clothing retailer Zozo, also received 1.1m likes for his tweet and 293,000 comments.

It means his tweet is the most popular of all time on the site, overtaking the 3.5m retweets received by a US teenager trying to persuade fast food chain Wendy’s to give him a year’s supply of chicken nuggets.

Maezawa, who uses the Twitter handle @yousuck2020, promised to share 100m yen (£725,000) between 100 people who had shared the tweet.

"To participate, all you have to do is follow me and RT this tweet," he said.

The offer was in response to his website Zozotown hitting 10bn yen in sales over the Christmas period.

Maezawa, who first gained prominence in Japan as drummer in punk band Switch Style, received recent press coverage in the West after signing up to be the first passenger of Elon Musk’s planned Space X flight around the moon in 2023.

Maezawa has said that he would invite six to eight artists from across the globe to join him on the trip into space.

Last year Maezawa grabbed headlines when he paid $110.5m (£85.4m) for a painting by the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat at an auction in New York.