Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, known professionally as PewDiePie, was born October 24, 1989, in Gothenburg, Sweden, according to his Wikipedia biography. His mother, Lotta Kjellberg, worked in information technology and was named Sweden’s CIO of the Year in 2010, while his father, Ulf Kjellberg, is a corporate executive; he has one older sister, Fanny. He enrolled at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg to study industrial engineering and management but left in 2011, midway through his degree, to focus on the YouTube channel he had already begun building, a decision his parents initially declined to support financially.

Kjellberg first registered a YouTube account in December 2006 under the name “Pewdie,” and after later forgetting the password he created the channel “PewDiePie” on April 29, 2010, per Wikipedia. He funded his early Let’s Play videos, mostly horror and action game commentary, by working as a harbor captain and selling prints of his own Photoshop artwork rather than relying on his parents. Growth was gradual at first: he passed 60,000 subscribers by December 2011, crossed one million in July 2012, and by October 2012 the analytics firm OpenSlate ranked his channel the most engaged on the platform.

His subscriber count accelerated sharply through 2013, reaching 10 million on July 9 and making him YouTube’s most-subscribed user by August 15 of that year, overtaking the sketch group Smosh, according to Wikipedia. In December 2012 he signed with the multi-channel network Maker Studios, later acquired by Disney, joining its gaming-focused Polaris sub-network in August 2013 and its Revelmode label in January 2016, a partnership that helped fund the YouTube Red original series “Scare PewDiePie,” which premiered in February 2016.

Kjellberg became the first individual channel to reach 50 million subscribers on December 8, 2016, and the first to reach 100 million on August 25, 2019, for which YouTube awarded him its Red Diamond Play Button, per Wikipedia. Forbes named him the world’s highest-paid YouTube star for 2016, with an estimated $15 million in pretax earnings, and Time magazine included him on its 2016 list of the 100 most influential people globally. He held the title of most-subscribed individual creator on the platform for roughly a decade before MrBeast overtook him on November 14, 2022.

His scale of fame is documented in an official Guinness World Records certificate, received August 15, 2013, for most-subscribed user, and he collected all five tiers of YouTube’s Creator Awards over his career, from Silver through the Red Diamond button. His feud with the Indian label T-Series over the “most-subscribed channel” title dominated global entertainment coverage in late 2018 and early 2019, spawning the diss tracks “Bitch Lasagna” and “Congratulations,” which together drew hundreds of millions of views during the rivalry that culminated when T-Series overtook him on March 27, 2019, according to Wikipedia’s account of the campaign. As of 2026 his main channel holds around 110 million subscribers and roughly 29.5 billion cumulative views.

Kjellberg built a reputation for turning down blanket brand-ambassador deals in favor of selective sponsorships worked into his regular content; Celebrity Net Worth’s earnings breakdown estimates he has charged in the region of $450,000 for a single sponsored video at his peak audience size. Documented sponsorship and licensing arrangements over his career include a promotional tie-in with Legendary Pictures’ 2014 horror film “As Above, So Below,” a branded Mountain Dew fan-fiction contest in January 2015, and a 2019 sponsored segment for the PayPal-owned coupon service Honey that became the vehicle for his short-lived pledge to the Anti-Defamation League, as reported by Forbes.

Beyond advertising revenue, Kjellberg has run several licensed product lines. His 2015 book, “This Book Loves You,” a parody self-help title released through Penguin Random House’s Razorbill imprint, debuted as an instant New York Times bestseller. In 2016 he lent his name and likeness to the freemium mobile game “PewDiePie’s Tuber Simulator,” developed by Outerminds, which topped one million downloads within 24 hours of its September 2016 launch before it was discontinued in 2019 when his content-licensing deal with the developer expired. In 2018 he and Marzia Bisognin launched Tsuki, a Japan-inspired unisex clothing line sold online through its own storefront.

Kjellberg bought a mansion in the Seven Dials area of Brighton, England, in 2016 after relocating to the UK earlier in the decade for better broadband access to support his YouTube work, a five-bedroom property with a private cinema and games room. In October 2019 he and Marzia purchased a home in Japan, a country he had visited repeatedly for both business and leisure, calling the acquisition “a dream come true,” according to SoraNews24’s coverage of the purchase. The couple relocated there permanently in May 2022 on a five-year business visa and settled in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward, and in April 2025 Kjellberg confirmed he had bought land there to build a permanent family home after roughly a year of searching.