PewDiePie is no longer YouTube’s most subscribed content creator

Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg is now no longer the most subscribed person on YouTube as Jimmy ‘MrBeast’ Donaldson has surpassed his subscriber count, with over 111 million subscribers at the time of writing.

In fact, Kjellberg was keen for Donaldson to take the throne. "Come on, I’ve been retired for like two years now. I can’t wait for it to be over," he said in a video from August, when Donaldson had just hit 100 million subscribers. "That’s alright he definitely deserves it. I hope he does it." To celebrate that achievement, Donaldson invited 100 subscribers to participate in challenges to win a private island. Previously, he's also done stunts like recreating Squid Game where one lucky winner walked away with $456,000 and promoted philanthropic causes like Team Seas and Team Trees in the interest of environmental conservation. This "go big or go home" mentality hasn't been without its detractors, however, and Donaldson was accused of "unreasonable" behaviour and bullying from former collaborators last year.

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Though Kjellberg has had his controversial moments, Donaldson cited him as a major inspiration for his own online career and said that he never thought he would overtake the popular YouTuber. "I appreciate how humble he is. Literally. I’m not gonna say names, but I think you can think of quite a few YouTubers, if they were in his position, that would just be arrogant and just be a giant pr*ck," praised Donaldson in an interview in 2020.

Perhaps Kjellberg might move to Twitter. Elon Musk is changing the social media site faster than we can keep up (presumably to get out of changing nappies for his four youngest children) and one of his latest ideas is to attract YouTubers and content creators to the platform. "''My kids were basically educated by Reddit & YouTube; Let’s just get a bunch of content creators that we think are cool on YouTube & say, 'Hey, would you consider putting your content on Twitter, & we’ll pay you 10% more than YouTube & see how it goes?' Let’s do that,''" relayed Sawyer Merritt, startup founder and Tesla investor, in a Tweet. Musk replied: "something tells me this would work." It's probably one of the more normal decisions Musk has made lately.