Kai Cenat: TIME100 Creators 2025

Time​ Magazine

09-07-2025

AB+DM for TIME
Kai Cenat is whipping a golf cart across the University of Akron campus on Memorial Day weekend, furiously honking his horn, quickly gaining ground on a trio of students who have cut class and are fleeing his wrath. Within seconds, Cenat has cornered them and shakes a fistful of keys in their faces, threatening them with detention as they cower against a wall. 'My office, lunchtime,' he spits. Over the next few days, Cenat will roam around campus corralling other troublemakers, mediating disputes, fixing tech issues, and delivering supplies.
None of this is real, per se. But every day, Cenat wakes up and creates his own reality. He has no real authority over these 'students,' who are actually among his best friends. This is Streamer University, a four-day content creator fantasy come to life, and Cenat is both the organizer and star.
With 18 million followers, the 23-year-old is, by many metrics, the most popular performer on the Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch—and one of the internet's biggest personalities, full stop. Cenat entertains his audience by acting out improvised skits, playing video games, delivering monologues about music or fashion, and interviewing pop culture icons. Teens love him because his content is both relatable and aspirational: he's turned having fun in his Atlanta house into a multi-million dollar empire. His influence reaches far beyond his young, rabid fanbase. He coined the term 'rizz' (Gen Z slang for romantic appeal), which Oxford named the word of the year in 2023. Rappers seeking his approval come to his house to premiere songs. Cenat reports that after he criticized the quality of Drake's 'Nokia' music video, Drake offered him the opportunity to direct another one. Photograph by AB+DM for TIME
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Streamers are most-often associated with teens playing video games in their parents' basements, but Cenat has helped turn the medium into a formidable hybrid of talk show, interactive game show, and reality TV. He is streaming's first major crossover act and its shepherd into an ever-widening future, bringing his brand of wide-eyed enthusiasm and manic comedy, influenced by Black comedic traditions from Richard Pryor's wry commentary to Wayne Brady's improv and Kevin Hart's self-deprecation, to mainstream cultural events like the Met Gala and the Grammys. This July, he and his friends in the creator collective AMP are streaming continuously out of the NBA Hall of Famer Tony Parker's Texas mansion.
Some, especially older, onlookers, find Cenat and his ever-growing flock of imitators distasteful or even dystopian. They see a man subjecting himself to a Truman Show spectacle of mindless distraction and constant surveillance, breeding a generation of narcissistic imitators. Streamers, on the other hand, don't understand why polite society puts up with jobs that all but suck the fun out of living and coastal gatekeepers who control the pipeline to fame. Cenat is exemplifying an increasingly popular worldview: that if you work hard enough on content creation, you can sell your life as an entertainment product, which leads to a better life, which leads to a better product, and so on.
'We're showing people that if you be yourself, people are going to f— with you,' Cenat tells TIME. 'As a streamer, you're not in a box. You're not trapped. You can talk however you want.' Kai Cenat photographed in Atlanta, GA on June 6 AB+DM for TIME
This year, Goldman Sachs estimated that there are 67 million content creators globally, forming a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry that is taking an increasingly large bite out of digital advertising, e-commerce, and consumers' subscription budgets. Cenat earns at least $6 a month from each of his subscribers (who differ from followers in that they pay to view his content without ads) and pockets 50-70% of the total, according to his manager. With a consistent subscriber base of more than 100,000, that adds up to at least $3.6 million a year through his stream. On top of that, he has inked lucrative deals with brands like Nike, McDonald's, and State Farm.
Streamer University is Cenat's most ambitious performance yet. He's gathered 130 creators on campus to create thousands of hours of content together in hopes of collectively growing their audiences. The students, whose flights, housing, and new tech equipment are all paid for by Cenat and brand deals, are here to flirt, feud, party, and learn from the best—all live on camera, of course.
On the first day, outside the university hall—despite efforts to conceal the event's location—dozens of children from all over the region stand behind police barricades, screaming the names of their idols. 'I've been watching Kai my whole life. If I fall asleep watching him, I wake up watching him,' says Amarion McCormick, a 12-year-old from Akron. He wants to follow in Cenat and other streamers' footsteps. 'They just do crazy stuff that I want to do, but I can't because I'm a kid still.'
One of the reasons that Cenat's fanbase loves him so much is his humble beginnings. As a child in the Bronx and later Atlanta, Cenat and his family bounced in and out of shelters as his Trinidadian immigrant mother hustled to make ends meet. 'I didn't digest it, but it was just confusing in terms of just having to move around a lot,' he says of his homelessness. 'I would go to school and nobody knew.'
Cenat was never a good student. He faced disciplinary actions and often struggled to read; he thinks he has dyslexia. 'I wasn't as smart as all the other kids,' he says.
He preferred to spend his time playing video games like Black Ops 2 or NBA 2K and watching creators on YouTube who broadcasted their lives with a mixture of outrageousness and earnest relatability. He posted his first video at the age of 16 in 2018, and was soon creating content that ranged from album reactions to neighborhood pranks, sometimes getting in trouble for recording at school. During college at SUNY Morrisville, he spent hours a day recording, editing, and uploading videos to a growing fanbase on YouTube.
Then the pandemic arrived in 2020, shutting down his college campus. Cenat eventually decided to drop out, move to a creator house in Atlanta, and commit to content creation, a timely move. Many kids were stuck at home and seeking entertainment and connection. As Hollywood productions shut down and releases slowed to a crawl, video games filled the void, as did the antics of influencers on social media. AB+DM for TIME
All of which boosted the popularity of Twitch. Young viewers loved it, because streamers were constantly on, spoke to them directly and uncensored, and reflected genuine youth culture. 'Twenty or 30 years ago, you couldn't really connect to your favorite actors: the only time you could see Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt was when interviews happened or movies came out,' says DeShae Frost, a 24-year-old streamer. 'Now, you can see your favorite person eat when they wake up and what they like to watch. The difference is that vulnerability: that mysterious act has gone away.'
Over the span of March 2020 to 2021, Twitch grew 80%. The platform now hosts 5 million streamers who are watched by 100 million viewers a month, resulting in more than 20 billion hours of content watched in 2024, the company says.
'If we're talking about pure numbers, it's not as big as other platforms,' says Nathan Grayson, a gaming journalist and the author of the book Stream Big . 'But with TikTok and Instagram Reels, a lot of that is transient: you're scrolling through the endless river of videos. With Twitch, it is an all-encompassing thing where you're spending hours a day watching them, and you're doing a lot of your socializing there. It's a cultural nexus point, and it's where a lot of the trends are generated.'
Grayson adds that for many kids, Twitch has supplanted older forms of media entirely: 'Kids don't really watch TV anymore—or if they do, it's because a Twitch streamer or YouTuber is also watching it and dissecting it.'
Cenat is not always the funniest, most suave, or smartest person on Twitch. But he tends to be the most consistent, the most creative, and the most energetically relentless, willing to do whatever it takes for eyeballs. His first big moment was when viewers clocked a rodent running across his bedroom floor; the chat exploded with insults and then glee when Cenat shrieked hysterically and fielded phone calls from mocking friends. 'All the attention was on me,' he now reminisces happily.
One viral moment does not make a career, so Cenat forged ahead, creating and starring in a youth basketball league; appearing in a MrBeast game show; streaming uninterrupted for days on end, showering (with swim trunks on) and sleeping on camera; holding snakes and other animals in his room; and booking bigger and bigger names as guests like John Cena and LeBron James.
Cenat's social battery is undying—or at least, it appears to be. In an off-camera interview in Atlanta two weeks after Streamer University, he shows a calmer and more introspective side. 'I'll be really tired and drained,' he admits. 'It's a mindset thing, though. I can be as physically tired as I want, but in my mind, if I say, 'Just keep going,' I'm gonna just keep going.'
His desire for constant growth and attention has sometimes backfired. When Cenat staged a promised giveaway of gaming items in New York City in 2023, the crowd that showed up caused a riot and over $50,000 in damages. Cenat paid restitution and apologized, and Manhattan prosecutors dropped their charges. 'I just want people to know that it wasn't my intention to start a riot,' Cenat says, sounding sheepish. 'But the news and the articles will never put out great things. It'll always be controversial or bad.'
These days, Cenat is getting far more press for his streaming productions, which are breaking records and ballooning in their ambition. In November, Cenat streamed for 30 straight days in an event he dubbed 'Mafiathon 2,' culminating in a wild, 10-hour session in which he and the comedians Kevin Hart and Druski navigated exploding turkeys, pickup basketball with LeBron James' son Bryce, and an unsettling group of actors portraying the Addams Family. All in all, the marathon garnered 50 million viewers, reportedly making over $3 million in revenue, and Cenat broke the record for highest paying-subscriber count on Twitch, at one point ascending to more than 727,000.
Cenat invests in massive production value because he feels he is directly competing with platforms like Netflix and Prime Video. 'If people pay for my subscription to get no ads, I want to make sure it's a movie every single time,' he says.
Dan Clancy, the CEO of Twitch, sees Cenat as blazing a new pathway to becoming an all-around entertainer, in the way that Hart or Robin Williams freely moved between mediums. 'In the past, you had to either act or be a stand up comic to, in the end, just become an entertaining person with a lot of charisma,' he says. 'Now, live streaming is this other channel, and Kai demonstrated this transition. He's very ambitious and driven, and always pushing the boundaries of what streaming is.'
Cenat conceived of and funded Streamer University himself, and it unfolded in waves of uproarious, bawdy chaos. Attendees recorded posse rap songs, became entangled in love triangles; formed sororities; and roved the dorm hallways in gangs, flinging bags of flour and shooting each other with water guns filled with fart spray. Cenat orchestrated a whole story arc in which streamers snuck off campus to go party—and then he, pretending to be furious, shut it down and brought them back. Kai Cenat Live/YouTube
While the event had a mix of personalities, viewers typically flocked to the most outrageous, controversy-seeking streamers, thus encouraging bad behavior. One morning, a trio of popular troublemakers—Ray, RaKai, and DeShae Frost—brazenly walked out of a classroom while a lecture was underway, tried to hijack two campus golf carts, and hurled insults at one of Cenat's 'janitors.' Fans delighted in their antics, and then their comeuppance, when Cenat eventually chased them down and threatened them with expulsion.
While Cenat was only feigning rage at that moment, he spent much of the weekend in a panic, tending to small crises. Room keys didn't work, equipment was lost, room assignments were bungled, and interlopers kept trying to sneak past campus police. When an expected shipment of tech equipment failed to arrive, Cenat's team fanned out across Best Buys and Walmarts in the area, buying up dozens of headphones, keyboards, and ring lights. 'Something that I'm noticing within myself, that I just discovered, is I have anxiety,' Cenat says. 'I'm always worrying, 'Oh god, what if things don't go right?' I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared.'
Anxiety runs deep in streaming communities. Content creators need to continuously assess how they are being perceived by thousands of people; they're under pressure to be witty and relatable, and to come up with new bits and dramatic arcs. 'Burnout is really common,' says the TikToker known as Bri Cheese. One morning at Streamer University, she admitted she barely slept the night before due to nerves. She wasn't alone: a sense of competition and the stress of constant surveillance caused many of the attendees to break down in tears. 'People wanted to go home; people were crying,' Cenat says. 'My job was to let them know: 'Do not give up. There's a lot of people that would want to be in your spot, so keep going.''
That included Cai Uwus, a smaller creator who cried on stream after word spread that a fellow attendee had insulted her appearance. But that moment went viral, which boosted Uwus' following. She estimates that she made more than $8,000 in new subscriptions over the weekend alone, and is now considering leaving her job as a project and operations manager to do streaming full time. 'Some people are going to hurt your feelings, but I'd rather get yelled at on the internet than, like, working at Chik-Fil-A or at a department store,' she says.
Some streamers have pushed themselves to unhealthy ends in order to increase their numbers. One YouTuber called Norme spent a month locked inside a closet, only eating when viewers sent him $10. Another creator, Emily, has been streaming for three years straight, including through bouts of depression and sickness, weathering insults and harassment from strangers. All of this has sparked plenty of concern from parental groups and mental health advocates. 'I worry about kids not living life for themselves, not developing a sense of self,' says Sarah Adams, an online child-safety advocate. 'Every aspect of their day, including sleep, is now a performance for external validation and likes and GIFs.'
To Cenat, the benefits outweigh the costs. And he wants to be known as someone who holds the door open for others. Students at Streamer University included Tota, a Brazilian teen who was selling candy to earn money for his family when Cenat met him in Brazil, and Ray, a Taiwanese teen who Cenat met in Japan, and now has 2 million followers on Twitch and a devoted fanbase of his own. 'He gave me a whole life,' Ray says. ''Made by Kai Cenat'—that's me.'
Notably, most of the participants at Streamer University were Black, with many coming from underprivileged backgrounds like Cenat's. There were aspiring restaurateurs, news anchors, and fitness instructors. Unlike in Hollywood—where creatives are often discouraged from championing Black culture by executives striving for 'universality'—on Twitch, they are allowed to unapologetically own their identities. Which Cenat sees as a pathway to more options in life. 'Before, it was either go rap, go hoop, get into sports, or trap and drug deal,' he says. 'Now people are saving up to go get a PC to stay at home and work on their craft—and that's beautiful.' AB+DM for TIME
As Cenat's influence and bankroll grow, he is mulling how to best make an impact on the world. Last year, he used his Mafiathon 2 stream to raise money to build a school in Nigeria, and wants to undertake more philanthropic efforts. He is far warier about using his influence in the political sphere. Top streamers have become increasingly political, with voices like Zack Hoyt, on the right, and Hasan Piker, on the left, delivering passionate monologues to loyal fanbases that rival the primetime audiences of mainstream television networks like CNN and Fox.
Cenat claims that last year, as Donald Trump made the rounds with streamers like Adin Ross, at least one Presidential campaign reached out to him to help boost their engagement with young voters. Cenat refrained, and still barely talks politics at all. 'It's just so confusing. I'm not in that world,' he says.
His next stop may be Hollywood, but true to the philosophy that undergirds streaming, he'd like to make an entrance on his own terms. The success of Streamer University—which yielded 27 million hours of viewing on Twitch alone—has emboldened him to think about what it would be like to conceptualize, fund, and organize a movie-grade production without having to go through the film industry's front door. 'Usually you go to Hollywood with some idea and hope people fund it,' he says. 'But I don't have to do that. I want to be the person running it and putting my money into it independently—until people start coming to me.'
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