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10 Most EPIC Celeb Instagram Accounts

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Instagram in September 2016 belonged to whoever could make a hundred million people stop scrolling.

By late summer 2016, Instagram had stopped being a place where celebrities posted vacation pics and started being the arena where fame itself got measured. Follower counts became scoreboards, a single photo could break a platform record, and the stars who figured out how to blend polish with personality pulled ahead of everyone else. TheThings Celebrity’s rundown of the “10 Most Epic Celeb Instagram Accounts” captures that exact moment, when the gap between staged promo shots and genuinely candid posts started deciding who actually won the platform.

• Selena Gomez crossed 100 million followers in September 2016, making her the most-followed person on Instagram and the owner of its most-liked photo ever — the Coca-Cola bottle shot.
• Taylor Swift held the No. 2 spot with more than 90 million followers, trailed closely by Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Kim Kardashian, and sisters Kylie and Kendall Jenner.
• Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s account sat around 65 to 70 million followers that September — not the 200 million figure later reported — placing him alongside Cristiano Ronaldo among the platform’s top male accounts.

Selena Gomez’s Record-Setting Run

No account moved faster in 2016 than Selena Gomez’s. She broke into triple digits that September, becoming the first person on Instagram to hit 100 million followers, and she did it while already holding the platform’s single most-liked photo in history — a simple, staged shot of her holding a Coca-Cola bottle that outperformed every celebrity post before it. The combination of a viral individual image and a record-setting follower count is what separated her from the rest of the pack that year.

Selena Gomez’s Coca-Cola bottle photo was, at the time, the single most-liked picture in Instagram’s history — and she still had the platform’s biggest following on top of it.

The Rock’s Real Numbers, and the Chase for the Top

Dwayne Johnson’s Instagram presence was genuinely massive in September 2016, but the widely repeated claim that he’d already cleared 200 million followers was years ahead of reality — that milestone didn’t land until late 2020. In the fall of 2016 his account was closer to 65 to 70 million followers, still enough to make him one of the very few men in the platform’s upper tier, running roughly alongside soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. Fans who followed him got the version this list describes: training footage, movie-set behind-the-scenes clips, and family moments mixed with his trademark blunt, funny captions.

Below Gomez and Swift, the leaderboard read like a who’s-who of pop culture: Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Kim Kardashian, and both Kylie and Kendall Jenner all sat in the upper ranks, each building an audience through a different mix of stagecraft and access. It’s the same dynamic that shows up whenever musicians who are nothing like they seem get discussed — the online persona and the private person aren’t always the same account.

Chrissy Teigen Broke the Format

While the rest of the top tier leaned on glamour shots and tour footage, Chrissy Teigen built her following by doing the opposite. She posted unfiltered food videos, blunt parenting humor, and running comment-section banter with her husband, John Legend, instead of the carefully lit promotional imagery most A-listers relied on. That approach is exactly why pop culture media singled her out in 2016 as the celebrity who redefined what a “relatable” account could look like — proof that spontaneity could compete with, and sometimes beat, a professional glam team.

The contrast mattered because it showed two paths to the same result: Gomez and Swift racked up followers through scale and spectacle, while Teigen did it through access and honesty. Both strategies worked, but only one of them didn’t require a hundred-million-follower head start — which is also why the same conversation keeps coming up whenever actors who ruined their careers on social media get compared to the ones who thrived there instead.

Teigen never needed a publicist’s sign-off to post a photo of a half-eaten plate of nachos or Legend rolling his eyes in the comments — that was the entire pitch, and by September 2016 it had outpaced plenty of accounts with ten times her polish.