Kai Cenat: First Streamer to Hit 1M Twitch Subscribers

Kai Cenat spent 2018 posting prank videos to a YouTube channel nobody outside his circle watched. In September 2025, during a monthlong livestream called Mafiathon 3, he became the first person in Twitch’s history to cross 1 million active subscribers. In between, he was arrested at a giveaway that turned into a riot, became the first streamer Nike ever signed, and landed on Forbes’ list of top-earning creators two years running. Here’s the sourced version of how he got from one point to the other — and what it’s actually worth.

The AMP years: how a prank channel became a streaming collective

Cenat, born in Brooklyn in December 2001 and raised across four siblings by a mother from Trinidad and Tobago, uploaded his first YouTube videos in January 2018 — pranks and challenge content, made while he was a student at SUNY Morrisville, according to a Rolling Stone profile via Yahoo Entertainment. He dropped out in 2020 to focus on content full-time.

The break that mattered wasn’t a video going viral on its own — it was getting pulled into AMP (“Any Means Possible”), a group of NBA 2K creators built around Fanum, Duke Dennis, ImDavisss and Agent. Fanum discovered Cenat and brought him in, and the joint content the group made together is what actually built his audience, per reporting summarized from multiple creator-economy outlets and Wikipedia’s sourced account of the group’s formation. Cenat moved his main output from YouTube to Twitch in February 2021, and that’s the platform where the rest of this story happens.

The record: first to 1 million subscribers, ever

Twitch subathons — extended, often monthlong livestreams that solicit paid subscriptions — had a previous high-water mark before Cenat got involved: VTuber Ironmouse. Cenat broke that record himself in his own November 2024 “Mafiathon 2,” pulling in over 700,000 subscribers, according to Forbes’ coverage of that event and analytics firm Stream Hatchet/Hatchet.gg.

Ten months later, he beat his own record by a full order of magnitude. During “Mafiathon 3,” a month-long subathon that ran through September 2025, Cenat became the first Twitch streamer ever to cross 1 million active subscribers — reaching the mark on September 28, 2025, according to Streams Charts, Yahoo Entertainment, and analytics tracker Hatchet.gg, which also logged 84.2 million hours watched across the month and a peak of 962,000 concurrent viewers — a 54% jump over Mafiathon 2. Twitch itself hasn’t published an independent tally we could confirm separately, so we’re citing the analytics trackers and outlets that covered the milestone as it happened, not a platform-issued number.

As with any subscriber count, this is a dated snapshot from September 2025, not a running total — expect it to have moved since.

The Union Square riot: the other kind of scale

Virality cuts both ways. On August 4, 2023, Cenat announced a PlayStation 5 giveaway at Union Square Park in Manhattan over social media. Roughly 1,000 people, many of them teenagers, showed up; the gathering turned into a riot, with crowds throwing bottles at officers, climbing on buses and smashing car windows, per Fox News’s reporting at the time. Police made 65 arrests, 30 of them juveniles, and Cenat was charged with inciting a riot and unlawful assembly.

The case resolved in May 2024: the Manhattan DA’s office dropped the charges after Cenat and two co-defendants apologized publicly on social media and paid more than $57,000 in restitution, most of it to the Union Square Partnership for cleanup costs — reported by the Associated Press and carried by ABC10, Yahoo Finance, and The Hill. We’re including this because a profile that only lists the wins isn’t a profile — the audience size that makes the brand deals below possible is the same audience size that turned a park into a scene the NYPD had to shut down.

The money: Nike, McDonald’s, and what Forbes actually counted

Three deals are documented well enough to describe with figures attached:

• Nike, announced February 2024. Cenat became the first streamer Nike ever signed to a partnership — not a one-off ad, an ongoing deal, as reported by AfroTech, Yahoo Finance, and Black Enterprise, all of which noted the deal terms themselves weren’t disclosed publicly — a case where we can confirm the deal happened, but not what it paid.
• McDonald’s, October 2024. McDonald’s brought Cenat on as the face of the Chicken Big Mac’s U.S. launch, with McDonald’s USA CMO Tariq Hassan framing it explicitly as reaching fans through “live-streaming” culture rather than a traditional TV buy, per Tubefilter and esports.gg. Again, no compensation figure was disclosed.
• T-Mobile, alongside Snoop Dogg and Patrick Mahomes — cited directly on Cenat’s own Forbes Top Creators profile, which frames it as part of him “going mainstream” beyond streaming-native sponsors.

On earnings: Forbes put Cenat at $8.5 million on its Top Creators list, ranking him 24th in the 2024 edition — a figure covered directly by Black Enterprise and TMZ, and confirmed directly on his Forbes profile page, which also notes an average engagement rate Forbes measured at “more than 12%” — one of the highest on that list. That’s the one number in this piece that comes from an outlet doing its own measurement rather than repeating a platform-reported figure, which is why we’re citing it separately from the deals above.

We are deliberately not citing a net-worth figure for Cenat. The trackers that publish one (the kind of site with “net worth” in the domain name) disagree with each other by tens of millions of dollars and don’t show their work — exactly the guessing-built-on-guessing this site’s sourcing standard exists to filter out. Forbes’ $8.5 million is reported income for one measured year, not net worth, and we’re not converting one into the other.

What our checker can — and can’t — tell you about him

Cenat is eligible for a real read on this site: he’s active on both YouTube and Twitch, the only two platforms our free authenticity checker can score against a live account. We didn’t run that check for this piece, and nothing above is, or implies, an authenticity score for his account. At his scale, “is this audience real” isn’t really the open question a smaller creator’s account raises before a brand deal — an audience this size gets independently confirmed by analytics firms tracking concurrent viewers in real time, which is a harder number to fake than a follower count. Where the checker earns its keep is on the account a brand is about to pay for its very first deal, not one that’s already cleared Nike’s due diligence.

If you want to see what a live read looks like, you can run it yourself at /check/twitch/kaicenat or /check/youtube/kaicenat — and the same free tool works for any smaller YouTube or Twitch account you’re actually trying to vet before a deal.

The bottom line

A prank channel, a discovery by another Bronx-adjacent creator, a riot the NYPD called a lesson in “the danger of social media,” and a Nike deal that made him a first in the company’s history — none of that is one clean narrative arc. It’s four separately reported facts that happen to belong to the same person, and the throughline is ordinary: an audience that got big enough, and verifiably real enough in real time, that a shoe company and a fast-food chain both decided it was worth building a national campaign around.

Sources: Rolling Stone profile via Yahoo Entertainment, “Who is Kai Cenat?”; Forbes, “Kai Cenat Reclaims Twitch Subscriber Title”; Hatchet.gg, “Kai Cenat’s Mafiathon 3 Full Recap”; Streams Charts, “Kai Cenat breaks Twitch subscribers record”; Yahoo Entertainment, “Kai Cenat surpasses 1 million”; Fox News, Union Square incident; ABC10 / AP, “Kai Cenat’s riot charges dropped”; Yahoo Finance, same AP story; The Hill, same AP story; AfroTech, Nike partnership; Yahoo Finance, Nike partnership; Black Enterprise, Nike partnership; Tubefilter, McDonald’s Chicken Big Mac; esports.gg, McDonald’s Chicken Big Mac; Forbes, Kai Cenat profile; Black Enterprise, Forbes Top Creators 2024; TMZ, Forbes Top Creators 2024.