How Fanum Built an Empire Streaming Much More Than Video Games

CultureHe got big streaming videos of his gaming exploits. He got huge (like, millions-of-fans huge) streaming videos of his offline life. Now, one of Gen Z’s wildest success stories explains his plans to revolutionize the rest of the media landscape.By Kieran Press-Reynolds Photography by Eric Ray DavidsonJanuary 28, 2025Jacket by Avirex. Tank top by Calvin Klein. Necklaces (throughout), his own.Save this storySaveSave this storySaveOne day last fall, the Twitch streamer Fanum sat down at his computer and got to work—which, in his case, meant making content that appeals to his millions of fans but would baffle most folks over 30. His stream unfurled like a day of summer camp, with nonstop inane activities. He began with a Vietnam mukbang (went to a Vietnamese restaurant, ordered and ate food), and then hit a Publix supermarket with fellow creator JasonTheWeen, where they met fans. “They spawning!” Fanum cracked as a fan ran up to him, agape, in the freezer aisle. Later, he and Jason rifled through Jason’s Hinge profile, appraising the women they came across; played basketball; and carved pumpkins together. All the while, Fanum frequently interacted with the always-on Twitch chat that viewers type messages into and unleashed a DJ set’s worth of sound effects to fill the empty space. He signed off after more than six hours.Say Fanum—like phan-tom, without the t—to most adults and you’ll be met with blank puzzlement. But mention him to any Twitch-using tween and they’ll spasm like a wind-up fidget toy. A 27-year-old famous for livestreaming himself sitting in a room, Fanum is among the most prominent—and perhaps most charming—in a new class of celebrities who represent the future of entertainment. For older generations, the idea of a man shaping culture by recording himself chatting and hanging with friends must be confounding. Maybe the best way to think of what Fanum and his peers are up to is: creating the public-access TV of the 2020s, only if public-access TV could make you rich.Shirt by Homme Plissé Issey Miyake. Tank top by Calvin Klein. Twitch—which allows users to broadcast live-time video and screen recordings to millions of viewers—has been around for nearly 15 years, and a few different waves of creators have blown up by streaming different genres of content. Emphasis on blow up: Streamers can make money via a combination of Twitch subscriptions, live donations, ad revenue from YouTube videos, and brand deals. (Just how rich has streaming made Fanum? Social Blade, the social media analytics site, estimates he makes, at minimum, tens of thousands of dollars a month from YouTube alone. And a representative for Fanum confirmed to GQ that streaming has made him a millionaire.)Even among high-earning streamers, Fanum represents something new. He is not performing wild stunts, he’s not a pro gamer, he doesn’t even have a magic voice. He’s…just a dude recording himself vibing out. Chillness is key to his everyman appeal. That, and his uncanny ability to create viral phrases: The phrase “Fanum tax,” which refers to Fanum’s habit of “taxing” his friends by taking bites of their food, jumped from the land of internet-born brain-rot humor into the real world, spawning countless articles trying to enlighten boomers—and terrifying countless zoomers with their first taste of losing touch with internet slang. It was an early example of Fanum’s ability to cross over—something he seems to want to do more often.A few weeks after his pumpkin-carving stream, I meet Fanum in LA, where he’s spending a few days creating content and conducting business. Originally from New York, he’s currently based out of Atlanta. He and his team have just flown in, so their secluded Beverly Hills Airbnb is in disarray. Multiple people offer me water before realizing there are no cups. Fanum’s assistant, a woman from Alabama named Meagan who’s been on the job for only a month, scrambles onto the roof to set up the Wi-Fi. Fanum’s friend Joshua, a.k.a. MahkioGz, who says he isn’t entirely sure what his job is, gives me a tour of an empty kitchen. As I wait for Fanum in the living room, I hear a constant stream of giggles and shouts through the wall. The gleeful chaos reminds me of an after-school hang sesh.Suit by Brooks Brothers. Shirt by Sefr at Bloomingdale’s. Boots by Allen Edmonds. Sunglasses by Jacques Marie Mage. His own watch by Rolex. Bracelet, stylist’s own. Ring by Shay. When Fanum emerges, he looks relaxed but also ready to strut down Melrose if need be, with a red-and-gold-striped white Supreme x Umbro track jacket and snug Suicoke sandals. As he sits beside me at a circular black table, his local hairdresser in the Bronx, a 19-year-old named Genesis whom he flew in, starts braiding his hair. It’s easy to see why he’s so adored: He’s a fast talker and eloquent in a motivational way, like a high school football coach or a self-help podcaster. His vocabulary is stuffed with digi-neologisms: He calls things “W” or “L” (good or b

Jan 29, 2025 - 06:36
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How Fanum Built an Empire Streaming Much More Than Video Games
He got big streaming videos of his gaming exploits. He got huge (like, millions-of-fans huge) streaming videos of his offline life. Now, one of Gen Z’s wildest success stories explains his plans to revolutionize the rest of the media landscape.
Image may contain Braid Hair Person Adult Accessories Jewelry Necklace Clothing Coat Face and Head
Jacket by Avirex. Tank top by Calvin Klein. Necklaces (throughout), his own.

One day last fall, the Twitch streamer Fanum sat down at his computer and got to work—which, in his case, meant making content that appeals to his millions of fans but would baffle most folks over 30. His stream unfurled like a day of summer camp, with nonstop inane activities. He began with a Vietnam mukbang (went to a Vietnamese restaurant, ordered and ate food), and then hit a Publix supermarket with fellow creator JasonTheWeen, where they met fans. “They spawning!” Fanum cracked as a fan ran up to him, agape, in the freezer aisle. Later, he and Jason rifled through Jason’s Hinge profile, appraising the women they came across; played basketball; and carved pumpkins together. All the while, Fanum frequently interacted with the always-on Twitch chat that viewers type messages into and unleashed a DJ set’s worth of sound effects to fill the empty space. He signed off after more than six hours.

Say Fanum—like phan-tom, without the t—to most adults and you’ll be met with blank puzzlement. But mention him to any Twitch-using tween and they’ll spasm like a wind-up fidget toy. A 27-year-old famous for livestreaming himself sitting in a room, Fanum is among the most prominent—and perhaps most charming—in a new class of celebrities who represent the future of entertainment. For older generations, the idea of a man shaping culture by recording himself chatting and hanging with friends must be confounding. Maybe the best way to think of what Fanum and his peers are up to is: creating the public-access TV of the 2020s, only if public-access TV could make you rich.

Shirt by Homme Plissé Issey Miyake. Tank top by Calvin Klein.

Twitch—which allows users to broadcast live-time video and screen recordings to millions of viewers—has been around for nearly 15 years, and a few different waves of creators have blown up by streaming different genres of content. Emphasis on blow up: Streamers can make money via a combination of Twitch subscriptions, live donations, ad revenue from YouTube videos, and brand deals. (Just how rich has streaming made Fanum? Social Blade, the social media analytics site, estimates he makes, at minimum, tens of thousands of dollars a month from YouTube alone. And a representative for Fanum confirmed to GQ that streaming has made him a millionaire.)

Even among high-earning streamers, Fanum represents something new. He is not performing wild stunts, he’s not a pro gamer, he doesn’t even have a magic voice. He’s…just a dude recording himself vibing out. Chillness is key to his everyman appeal. That, and his uncanny ability to create viral phrases: The phrase “Fanum tax,” which refers to Fanum’s habit of “taxing” his friends by taking bites of their food, jumped from the land of internet-born brain-rot humor into the real world, spawning countless articles trying to enlighten boomers—and terrifying countless zoomers with their first taste of losing touch with internet slang. It was an early example of Fanum’s ability to cross over—something he seems to want to do more often.

A few weeks after his pumpkin-carving stream, I meet Fanum in LA, where he’s spending a few days creating content and conducting business. Originally from New York, he’s currently based out of Atlanta. He and his team have just flown in, so their secluded Beverly Hills Airbnb is in disarray. Multiple people offer me water before realizing there are no cups. Fanum’s assistant, a woman from Alabama named Meagan who’s been on the job for only a month, scrambles onto the roof to set up the Wi-Fi. Fanum’s friend Joshua, a.k.a. MahkioGz, who says he isn’t entirely sure what his job is, gives me a tour of an empty kitchen. As I wait for Fanum in the living room, I hear a constant stream of giggles and shouts through the wall. The gleeful chaos reminds me of an after-school hang sesh.

Image may contain Clothing Formal Wear Suit Blazer Coat Jacket Person Sitting Footwear Shoe Wristwatch and Face

Suit by Brooks Brothers. Shirt by Sefr at Bloomingdale’s. Boots by Allen Edmonds. Sunglasses by Jacques Marie Mage. His own watch by Rolex. Bracelet, stylist’s own. Ring by Shay.

When Fanum emerges, he looks relaxed but also ready to strut down Melrose if need be, with a red-and-gold-striped white Supreme x Umbro track jacket and snug Suicoke sandals. As he sits beside me at a circular black table, his local hairdresser in the Bronx, a 19-year-old named Genesis whom he flew in, starts braiding his hair. It’s easy to see why he’s so adored: He’s a fast talker and eloquent in a motivational way, like a high school football coach or a self-help podcaster. His vocabulary is stuffed with digi-neologisms: He calls things “W” or “L” (good or bad), describes the way he streams as simply “desktop” (on the computer) or “IRL” (outdoors), and refers to his audience as “chat” (a.k.a. the free--flowing, perpetual Twitch chat box his fans type in). Oozing enthusiasm, he gets so excited sometimes his mouth curls up and his brows bounce.

The way Fanum describes it, his life is a giant, joyous sleepover with the homies. He lives with the other members of his six--person influencer collective, AMP, in a mansion in Atlanta. (The group’s name, an acronym for Any Means Possible, is another Fanum coinage.) Their days seem to mostly consist of making content, eating food, and making more content. “It’s fun. Like never--ending,” Fanum tells me, leaning back in his chair. “We don’t really think too hard about it, but like, bro, we’re always together.” Their house doubles as living space and streamer Disneyland, with pools and a basketball court. Fanum might start a stream in his room, then text another AMP member to play basketball, which they’ll stream, he tells me, using handheld cameras. “We’re all childlike,” Fanum explains. He laughs. “We’re all adults low-key. We just don’t want to be gray, you know?”

Fanum’s cameraman and tech guy, a 23-year-old who goes by Vinny, says his boss is beloved because he’s relatable and he looks out for people. Vinny’s worked for him for about two years, after his friend sent him an Instagram post of Fanum seeking a cameraman. He says they linked up and just locked in. Some observers have compared the way streamers like Fanum record themselves every day in a self-imposed panopticon to a kind of performance art—call him Marina AbramoTwitch. Harmony Korine sparked memes and mockery after he declared the volcanic livestreamer iShowSpeed the new Andrei Tarkovsky. But Korine is onto something when it comes to the experimental edge of the new breed of streamers. Using an unbelievable array of cameras—like the surveillance system for the Mall of America—they’ve mastered a new kind of long take: the uncut eight-hour day-in-the-life shot.

Fanum says he feels like his streams are movies, particularly when he broadcast from the New York penthouse AMP rented last summer. “You start off with the sun up here,” he says with his hand in the air. “Five hours pass, it’s coming down. My outro is Tems’s ‘Free Mind.’ I play that, sunset combined, it’s like, ahh, we just watched greatness.” He rubs his hands together. Fanum loves cinematic grandeur; his favorite movie of all time is Interstellar. When he asks me for mine and I say Raging Bull, he immediately shoots back: “Does that beat Interstellar for real, though?”

One mini-Interstellar at a time, Fanum and his peers are building a new entertainment industry. As Hollywood studios and their film-and-TV-streaming platform frenemies confront a state of constant crisis, livestreamers are vacuuming up an entire generation of idle consumers.

Watch time has increased staggeringly over the past decade: In 2014 over 260 million hours of Twitch streams were watched every month, according to the analytics database TwitchTracker. Time spent on the platform spiked during the initial months of the pandemic, leading viewership to soar in 2020 to over 1.5 billion hours every month (and that’s not including competitors like Kick and Rumble).

You’d think traditional media companies, which often seem clueless about how to reach a younger audience, would be banging on Fanum’s door. But Hollywood has yet to really approach him, he says. “People are still waking up. They still don’t understand what streaming is,” he explains. “They’re like, ‘What do you mean, you’re live?’ ”

Fanum dreams of elevating livestreams to the level of a Hollywood mega-set, where every influencer-actor gets a trailer and the production is über-sleek. “Movie shit applied to the stream version,” he declares, half in reverie.

The most intricate production Fanum has participated in is Inside, a reality show in the vein of Big Brother produced by YouTuber-boxer KSI and his influencer group Sidemen. Fanum is ambivalent about doing another traditional reality-TV show, but he gets excited talking about the scale of KSI’s production. “That’s us,” he says. “Just other creators with an idea, and they made it a reality.”

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Coat by Burberry. Tank top by Calvin Klein. Pants by Fear of God Essentials. Boots by Danner. Sunglasses by Ahlem. His own watch, necklace, and ring.


Streamers’ origin stories are unlike those of conventional celebrities, because how do you work your way toward a job that hasn’t been invented yet? Growing up in the Bronx, Fanum (born Roberto Escanio) idolized Biggie Smalls and spent most of his childhood mistakenly thinking the rapper was still alive. “Once I found out he passed away before I was even born, I was like, ‘What?’ Like nah, y’all lying to me. I didn’t understand the concept of death yet,” he says, laughing.

His earliest YouTube experiments were mostly imitation. He stole clips from places like Worldstar Hip-Hop, he tells me, and re-uploaded them under his own account, which got him “terminated like 40 times” from the platform. A pivotal moment came, he says, when he started eighth grade at the Bronx Early College Academy. He discovered Apple laptops and the software iMovie, which let him fine-tune his videos. He loved the cracked Call of Duty expert Whiteboy7thSt. “I was in school, stealing Wi-Fi to watch his videos,” he recalls. Which made him think: Why couldn’t he do the same thing? “I just felt like there wasn’t somebody from where I’m from that did content,” he says.

He funded his nascent hobby by selling plastic bead patches in school, to tourists downtown, and in train stations, flipping something like $80 in materials into a grand. He used that money to upgrade equipment: a pristine Snowball mic, mouse, and headphones. He worked other jobs, too, pulling shifts at a deli at 167th and Ogden in the Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx.

His parents, he tells me, were dentists in the Dominican Republic, but he says the US wouldn’t validate their credentials. They pushed him to focus on school. His early rise in content creation was baffling to them: “[My mom] sees the only way out as school. Here’s her son, in a room, just making videos and somehow getting paid. She literally thought I was selling drugs at first.” Despite winning the Breakout Streamer award at the 13th Streamy Awards in 2023, he says they don’t really understand what he does for a living.

In high school, he says, he studied architecture, and once attended a specialty program at Cooper Union. As a student at City Tech, Fanum says he couldn’t afford the $400 worth of books, so he used his phone to take pictures of the homework; he also hopped the train barrier every day to save money. One day, his phone screen broke and he couldn’t pay the $80 for repairs. Upset, the next morning he couldn’t bring himself to leave his mom’s house. Instead of going to college, he’d fully commit himself to YouTube: He uploaded three videos the day he dropped out.

“The hustle was so strong,” he says now, gravely. “I was barely sleeping. I was going dummy. Then within a year, AMP was a thing. A year after that, we had the [Atlanta] house. A year after that, we got this house. I knew it was me against the world.”

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Sweater by Kartik Research at Bloomingdale’s. Sweatpants by Lu’u Dan. Shoes by Clarks.

To their tens of millions of fans, AMP is basically the Avengers of the streaming world. Beyond the Fanum tax, the group’s members helped popularize brain rot like rizz and huzz, which recently set TikTok ablaze. Classrooms around the world are now infested with AMP-enese. Fanum gets giddy prophesying the crew’s legacy. “I think the kids now, 20 years later, are gonna be like, ‘Bro, remember Fanum tax! Remember rizz!’ ”

At first, though, AMP was just an idea of Fanum’s: to form a squad committed to ambitious content production. He scouted many members individually. Duke Dennis, Fanum says, had fewer than 100 subscribers and was streaming off a dusty PlayStation camera when Fanum brought him in. He found Davis Dodds back when he went by elitebuckets32, he says; last year, Dodds released a song featuring T-Pain. Perhaps Fanum’s biggest coup is Kai Cenat, the 23-year-old whose recent Mafiathon 2 stream, which ran the entire month of November, broke Twitch’s record for highest subscriber count and drew guests like Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart, and Bill Nye. (Kim Kardashian costarred in the promo video.) Fanum brought Cenat, an acquaintance from the Bronx he’d sometimes made videos with, into the fold when AMP had five members but was searching for a secret sixth spark. He decided to extend the official invite when Cenat spontaneously jumped into a mall fountain while filming a video. “I said, ‘There you go, we got it. Boom,’  ” Fanum recalls. When the two first made content, Fanum says Cenat was surprisingly shy. “I was telling him, bro, stop. Just do what we do in the Bronx.”

AMP became notorious for their infectious personas, best captured by the ubiquitous buzzword aura (“Aura is dope,” Fanum says, giggling mischievously) and inane antics. They’ve done Firework Wars where they obliterate one another’s rooms by setting off dozens of sparklers inside, and hosted an AMP-themed Bachelorette series. They basically have PhDs in clip farming, or doing such ridiculous things on stream that a viewer clips it and it blows up on social media. The team now live in Atlanta, which Fanum says they chose because of Georgia’s advantageous tax policies. (The Fanum tax, however, still applies.) When I ask if the boys squabble or have sanitary issues—I’ve lived in all-male houses and know how fetid they can get—he looks confused, like he hasn’t considered it. “Yeah, bros argue all the time,” he says nonchalantly. But they don’t fight about trivialities like doing the dishes. “We don’t have dishes,” he explains. “We just order food.”

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Fanum surrounded by his friends, clockwise from left: Walton (Jeremy Molina), MahkioGz (Joshua Molina) , Vinny (Jose Pimentel), Meagan Bown. Shirt by Tommy Hilfiger. Pants by Brigade. Watch and bracelet, his own.

In the 2010s, livestreaming influencers often had a focus—gaming, sports, makeup, ASMR—and would chat in between or after activities. The genius of AMP is how they made hanging out and being charming (“Just Chatting,” as it is called on Twitch) the main attraction. (It makes sense that they rose during the pandemic, at a time when kids were lonely.) They also helped popularize “IRL” streaming, a genre that involves getting up from the computer and walking around. That’s one of the ways Fanum initially blew up: streaming himself hanging out in the Bronx.

IRL can be thrilling but fraught; Wi-Fi issues can derail a whole stream. More seriously, last July, a video captured a cop pointing his gun at Fanum’s car while Fanum was streaming at the Bronx Dominican Parade. He had been interacting with fans at the parade, feeling the full-circle pride of bringing a Lambo to the same streets he used to walk on. “I don’t know what that was. I did everything right and the NYPD still found a way,” he says and groans. “Once again, people don’t understand the stream world, and it can be intimidating when there’s 100 people chasing my car.” The stream cut off and Fanum tells me the cops took his car for three hours. (The NYPD’s office of public information did not provide a specific response to GQ’s requests for comment about the incident.) That’s the thing about livestreaming: Just off camera, the less joyous parts of life go on. The only time Fanum’s smile vanishes during our conversation is when he tells me that, at least four times, he’s been on air when he’s received texts notifying him that someone he knows has just died. He rarely stops recording. Instead, he tries to compartmentalize the dread, but sometimes he can’t, and he breaks. He’ll take two minutes to compose, then go back and apologize to his live audience. “I’m really transparent with my chat. I don’t want to show a negative moment on stream, but shit happens; we all live in this life, right?” he muses. “Those are the worst moments, those texts, they just suck. After the stream, trust me, I be fighting it.”

Mega-fame in the streaming world comes with workplace hazards: a nitpicking audience, the fear of being swatted, the isolation of living in a streamers-only bubble. Endlessly being “on” can also take a serious toll on the psyche. Fanum recalls feeling mentally destroyed after a 48-hour streaming stretch. “I remember getting off and I was like, Whoa, what day is it?” He likes doing outdoor streams because they offer a reprieve. “When you do it too much—specifically desktop—being in the same room every single day, it can cook you.”

He’s grown passionate about mental health and has done stream sessions known as Grown-Man Hours, where he puts on some lo-fi beats and gets raw. He’ll divulge his own worries, interact with fans, give advice to people when he feels he can or suggest they get professional help when he feels he can’t. “I know what it’s like to feel like the world is closing in on you,” he tells me. At one point in his life, he “had super bad anxiety, damn near close to a disorder,” and panic attacks.

Now, he says, people sometimes approach him thinking he’s a motivational speaker. He tells me he’s had fans come up to him teary-eyed, saying his content has saved their lives. “That’s a bless, that’s a W, bro,” he says, glowing. He pauses to make sure he’s been understood. “You know what’s a W and an L?” I nod. “That’s a W.”


Fanum thinks AMP is on the vanguard of coolness in the streaming world, which used to be associated with socially awkward dorks. Before the live-influencer boom, “people would clown your typical streamer.” Now streamers are widely beloved—clouted, to use their term. “We made it cool to play games, we made it cool to be you, to be on stream and have fun,” he says. He talks about upgrading the fashion in the creator space: “Your typical merch…they just slap their YouTube or Twitch name. No, I want to make it cool, like, Yo, where you got that from?” He says he plans on dropping a line of high-end streetwear. “You troopin’ through life,” he explains. “Clothes make you feel a certain type of way, almost like armor in a game.”

Currently, Fanum has nine employees, he says, and 30 other associates who help in less concrete ways, like running his Grand Theft Auto server. They discuss stream ideas at weekly meetings online, and otherwise seem to operate like an anarchic start-up. (At one point, Vinny, who is lying on the couch as Fanum and I speak, starts snoring in the background.) “Usually, I’ll come up with an idea, I let Meagan know,” Fanum explains, and she helps make it a reality. In the past, they’ve gotten animals from farms, like a goat named Curry. Recently, Meagan sourced five live turkeys from Craigslist. He tells me he did not eat the turkeys, though his chat was under that impression.

The employee-boss relationship seems to be friends-first, and work-life separation is an irrelevant concept. “It’s a lifestyle,” Vinny says. “We think of everything. Not everything, but, in the back of our minds: What could be content?” He tells me that Fanum has helped him out personally before, but when I ask for an example, the only thing Vinny can think of is tied into producing more content: When his laptop broke, Fanum went to the Apple store to get him a fresh one, “just so I could keep working and not slow down the pace.”

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Cardigan by Polo Ralph Lauren. Vintage jersey from Mr. Throwback. Pants by PS Paul Smith at Bloomingdale’s. Watch, his own by Rolex.

We’re in a moment where the cultural impact of streamers rivals—and sometimes perhaps eclipses—traditional media and celebrities, especially when it comes to the younger generation. Fanum believes his audience is predominantly aged 14 to 25, though there are outliers (“The oldest I’ve seen in my chat, he’s like 67”), and he estimates his chat is 70 percent male, 30 percent female. But streamers’ influence goes way beyond inventing and propagating slang: The quantity of young men in streamers’ chats became suddenly relevant to political pundits after some of Donald Trump’s supporters attributed his 2024 election victory, in part, to his interviews with male-skewing podcast hosts and livestreamers.

When I mention the election, Fanum looks pained, like he can’t believe I’m asking. “I’m not even going to deal with it,” he says. Whenever I bring up anything vaguely contentious, Fanum seems to contort himself to say something positive. Of the vicious Drake-Kendrick beef, he says the winner “depends on who you ask. Both good songs in my opinion.” He doesn’t like the idea of “bad songs,” in any case, because “you can find the good in everything.” He’s quiet when I ask if AMP plans to do anything else like Kai Cenat’s 2023 PlayStation giveaway in New York’s Union Square, which resulted in a large crowd surge and led to Cenat being charged for, among other offenses, inciting a riot. (The charges against him were later dropped by the Manhattan DA office after Cenat posted an apology on social media and paid a restitution fee.) “Yeah, mm-mm-type shit, I don’t know,” Fanum mumbles opaquely. Initially, I find it puzzling that someone willing to record his entire life, like he’s voluntarily signed up for The Truman Show, clams up when the cameras aren’t rolling. But his caution makes a degree of sense: Maybe he’s trying to safeguard his aura, or is wary of comments being taken out of context (a stream, after all, is nothing but context), or doesn’t want to alienate potential viewers or collaborators.

Or perhaps there’s a simpler reason: He’s trying to build a business. Fanum is exploring expansions—music, clothing lines, more-intricate streams. Looking around the living room, he brainstorms an idea to jet around the world, streaming himself eating across different cultures—like a terminally online Gen Z Anthony Bourdain. He wants to direct his own feature film someday too—something polished enough that other creators make content reacting to it.

As someone who became famous by simply chatting, he wields a powerfully flexible sort of celebrity. His fans love him, but not for his gaming skills or political opinions. They just want Fanum. He can do whatever he wants and his millions of chatters will follow. To a guy who’s found ridiculous success by making choices that few parents would advise, maybe the really radical move would be doing something conventional. “I kinda want to be a dental hygienist,” he jokes with a glint in his eyes. “I just wanna make my mom smile, follow in her steps.”

When we finish speaking, the commotion of the house immediately kicks up again. “That was dope, though; I ain’t gonna lie,” he says, getting up from the table. His team members swarm around him, laughing and cracking jokes. Time to get back to the forever-fun sleepover. There’s content to make.

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Kieran Press-Reynolds is a contributor for Pitchfork and an editor of No Bells from Brooklyn.

A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of GQ with the title “Everyone Pays the Fanum Tax”

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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Eric Ray Davidson
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Braids by Genesis Flores
Skin by Hee Soo Kwon using La Mer
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Prop Styling by Krzysztof Katus
Produced by Annee Elliot Productions

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