PewDiePie

Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie, was for six years the most-subscribed creator on YouTube. He showed the world that one person with a webcam and a video game could build an audience larger than a television network — and then showed something rarer: that such a person could step back from the race and choose a quieter life.

Gothenburg

Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg was born on 24 October 1989 in Gothenburg, Sweden. His parents both worked as corporate executives. As a child he drew characters from video games and spent much of his time playing them.

He went to Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg to study industrial economics and technology management. He was not happy there. In 2010 he left the course, to his parents’ dismay, and decided to make YouTube videos. To pay for a better computer he worked selling hot dogs.

The Let’s Play Years

He registered the channel PewDiePie in April 2010. His early videos were “Let’s Plays”: recordings of him playing games, with his face in a small window in the corner, reacting as he went. His breakthrough came with horror games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, in which his exaggerated screams, jokes and running commentary made the videos funnier than the games.

His audience — mostly teenagers, whom he called the “Bro Army” — grew very fast. In August 2013 he became the most-subscribed creator on YouTube. He held that position, with brief exceptions, for almost six years, and at his peak was one of the highest-earning people on the platform.

He met his future wife, the Italian creator Marzia Bisognin, in 2011, and she moved to Sweden and later to Brighton, England, with him. She ran her own successful channel for several years.

2017

In February 2017 the Wall Street Journal reported that several of his videos contained anti-Semitic jokes and Nazi imagery, including one in which he paid two men on a freelancing website to hold up a sign with an anti-Semitic message. He said the videos were meant to mock how far people would go for money, but accepted that they were offensive. Disney’s Maker Studios ended its partnership with him, and YouTube cancelled the second season of his original series.

Later that year he used a racial slur during a live stream and apologised. The controversies made him one of the most debated figures in online culture, and he later said he had been careless and had learned from it.

PewDiePie vs T-Series

In 2018 it became clear that the Indian music label T-Series would soon overtake him as the most-subscribed channel on YouTube. His fans, and many other creators, turned the race into a global meme. “Subscribe to PewDiePie” appeared on billboards, in songs and in hacked printers. The Indian creator CarryMinati released a viral diss track aimed at him during the contest.

In the end T-Series passed him in 2019. The race showed how much a single creator could still mobilise, but also how some fans took it too far; after the name was used in a terrorist attack in New Zealand in March 2019, he called on fans to end the meme.

Marriage and Japan

He married Marzia in August 2019. In 2020 he took a break from YouTube, and afterwards posted less often, in a calmer style: commentary, drawing, books, coding and home projects. In 2022 the couple moved to Japan, which they had long talked about, and he began posting relaxed vlogs about their life there. Their son was born in 2023.

In recent years he has made videos about building his own computers, switching to the Linux operating system and running his own software and AI models at home, attracting a new audience of technology enthusiasts. In 2026 he announced that he would end the family vlogs in September to protect his son’s privacy, while continuing to make other videos.

His main channel has more than 110 million subscribers. MrBeast has since overtaken him as the most-subscribed individual creator.

What He Changed

Before PewDiePie, gaming videos were a niche. After him, they were one of the biggest categories on YouTube, and streaming gameplay became a profession for millions. His informal, personal style — talking directly to his audience as friends — became the template for a generation of creators.

He also went through, very publicly, the problems that came with that power: how to be funny without being cruel, how much a creator is responsible for his fans, and how to keep a private life. The answer he eventually chose was to step back.

The measure of him is that he walked away from the top while he was still there. Most people at the peak of a race keep running. He moved to Japan, had a family, and made the videos he wanted to make.

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