In YouTubes early days, the odds seemed good that the platform would be destroyednot by a competitor, but by its own popularity.
How could any young video startup ever cover the cost of streaming so much content across the internet? Or avoid the fate of Napster, another media-sharing startup of the era that was sued out of business for rampant copyright infringement? Even being acquired by Google in 2006 posed a risk: YouTube could have been mismanaged into irrelevance, as often happens after tech giants acquire shiny new toys.
But over its first 20 years, YouTube didnt just surviveit revolutionized media, redefining what TV could be. By letting anyone upload video for free, it empowered a new generation of creators to cater to every imaginable audience and attract fan bases in the millions. It taught marketers to appreciate the value of reaching these viewers, and it used technology to give rights holders control over their content. The platform conquered PCs and then smartphones and was eventually available on nearly every new TV set.
Today, with 2 billion logged-in users a month, YouTube is watched more than any traditional TV outlet. According to Nielsen, the company has grown its total viewers by nearly 50% since December 2023, bounding past Paramount, NBCUniversal, and Disney to take the top spot among media companies. Its now the U.S.s most-watched video provider, not just among streamers but cable and broadcast TV channels, too. Its 2024 ad revenue was $36.15 billion, a figure that doesnt include subscription revenue from its YouTube Premium and YouTube TV businesses.
YouTubes story is still unfolding, and new twistssuch as the arrival of generative AIhave yet to play out. But to understand where business, tech, and culture are heading, there may be no smarter place to look than YouTubes past. We talked to dozens of employees, creators, and other eyewitnesses to tell the story of where YouTube has been, and where its going. (Their comments have been edited for length and clarity.)
In this articlethe first chapter of an oral history Fast Company will be publishing in five partssome of those interview subjects recall key moments in YouTubes earliest days, from tiny startup to category-defining phenomenon. Its story, like so many others, began at PayPal. The payments startups early employees, whod be known as the PayPal mafia, began to infiltrate the tech industry and start new companies, particularly after PayPal went public in 2002 and was acquired by eBay soon after.
Steve Chen, cofounderwith Chad Hurley and Jawed Karimof YouTube: The three of us and most of the early YouTube hires, that original core team, all came from PayPal. We had had at least three or four years of experience working together. Chad, I think, I met on the first day that I landed in Silicon Valley.Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO and partner at Sequoia Capital, YouTubes first investor: PayPal was a bit of a cauldron of an experience. We had a very small team in the office, next to the Palo Alto dump. I remember being there on weekends and seeing Steve standing outside smoking, because he was still a smoker back then. I worked with Jawed on a project in 2000.
While Chen, Hurley, and Karim hatched plans for a video-sharing startup in early 2005, an entire field of such services was sprouting up, including Google Video, Revver, Veoh, and Vimeo. All leveraged Macromedias Flash software, which shipped with most web browsers and had simplified the formerly gnarly process of streaming video over the internet. In Chen, Hurley, and Karims initial conception, their service would focus on letting people upload videos of themselves to find dates.
Casey Neistat, filmmaker whose 2003 video iPods Dirty Secret had been a rare pre-YouTube viral phenomenon: When I first started making movies in the very early 2000s with my older brother, there was no appropriate venue for the kind of videos that we made.
Felicia Day, actress, singer, writer, and YouTuber: Its so strange to think that people didnt watch videos online. I remember seeing the lightsaber kid, and thats pretty much it.
Mike Downey, senior product manager, Flash: In the early days of Flash, the player was bundled with Netscape Navigator. Microsoft then knew they needed to bundle Flash with Internet Explorer. Because IE couldnt succeed if it didnt have everything Netscape had.John Harding, Google software engineer (2005-2007); YouTube engineering manager, director, VP (2007-present): Before [Flash], you needed either desktop software or complicated browser plug-ins, and it didnt work for half of the people half of the time.
Downey: The alternative was RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, or a couple of others. You were taken out of the web and into the RealPlayer experience or the Windows Media Player experience, and it wasn’t a seamless thing.Billy Biggs, Google/YouTube software engineer (2006-present): Flash video is what made this all possible. Suddenly the internet had video as a thing.
Harding: We did some pretty cool things with Google Video that we hadn’t seen other people do. Like, we let you jump all the way to the end or any point within a video, which was something that Flash didn’t actually support.Dmitry Shapiro, founder and CEO, Veoh: I started pitching Veoh to investors in mid-January of 2005. And the first person that I pitched [to] was a guy named Roelof Botha at Sequoia. Im not suggesting that Roelof took my idea and gave it to Chad and Steve. But the history shows that we were there at a similar time.Chen: We started development in February of 2005. Even during that phase, we were not sure whether Macromedia Flash would be sufficient.Botha: I was at a gathering of former PayPal people in San Francisco, and somebody mentioned, Hey, you should check out what Jawed and Chad and Steve are working on. And so I went home and typed in the URL and discovered YouTube. They were still in Chads garage in Menlo Park at the time, the three of them. I reached out, and we started to chat about the business.Chen: When we originally released it, we thought that it was going to be a dating site. After a week passed by and zero videos were uploaded, we thought, Okay, before we give up, why dont we just open it all up and let the users decide what they want to upload? It wasnt that we saw a spike in traffic right away, but we started seeing sprinkles of content come in.
Me at the Zoo
April 2005
In the first-ever YouTube video, the platforms cofounder Jawed Karim informs us that elephants have really, really, really long trunks, and thats cool. Its a start
Shapiro: Veoh believed that it was going to be extraordinarily expensive to host and stream video from our servers, and therefore we needed to build a peer-to-peer network to dissipate the costs. Chad and Steve didn’t try to solve the problem. They got to market fast and became a hit.
As the service gained traction with creators, there was more stuff to watch. As more people watched, there was more incentive for creators to post. This virtuous circle propelled growth.
Chris Maxcy, YouTube VP of business development (2005-2013): When I started, my hypothesis was, this is a young company thats going to have to work with the AOLs of the world, the Yahoos of the world, because its going to be all about getting traffic. That premise quickly changed.
Evolution of Dance
April 2006
In under eight minutes, Judson Laipply prances his way through decades of American pop music, from Chubby Checker to Eminem. Winningly energetic and goofy, this was the most-watched YouTube video of all time as late as October 2009.
Chen: We started seeing a spike in activity through the social networking sites out there. At the time, MySpace was the biggest one, and they allowed you to take that same embed code that you see on YouTube today and embed it into your MySpace updates. Overnight, that video could get hundreds of thousands of other people putting it into their own profiles and sharing it with their entire network.
Rhett McLaughlin, cocreator and cohost (with Link Neal) of Good Mythical Morning: People started asking us, Why don’t you have a YouTube channel? And we said, We don’t have one because YouTube channels are for people who don’t have websites. We didn’t understand anything about what was about to unfold.
Ian Hecox, cocreator (with his high school friend Anthony Padilla) of the comedy duo Smosh, which got its start lip-synching TV theme songs: We started making these videos out of sheer boredom. And then, when we found out about YouTube, one of our main drivers [to post videos there] was just free hosting. Because every time somebody watched a video through our website or on MySpace, we would have to pay for that bandwidth.
Justine iJustine Ezarik, YouTuber, whose first YouTube video was test footage showing her microwaving and eating oatmeal: I was posting videos everywhereMySpace, Yahoo, Revver. There were just a bunch of places that were hosting videos. I started posting to YouTube mostly just to store the videos.
Botha: Part of what YouTube did was they had the comment section. They were able to cultivate a community.
Anthony Padilla, cofounder, Smosh: You could see the audience feedback immediately. You could refresh the page and see the views go up immediately. Seeing those numbers increase when we made something better helped us refine what we made so we could continue doing what we liked.
Ezarik: I was like, Oh, this is so cool. Theres a whole community of people here. So I started posting for [the YouTube] audience, and then finding other people who were making videos. And thats where it got interesting. There werent many people doing it.
Hecox: What initially attracted people to our content was the accessibility of it and the relatability of it. Any kid that ever had a camera could relate to what we were doing. They’re like, I also have access to a camera and I make silly skits with my friends.
Mia Quagliarello, YouTube senior product marketing manager, content and community (2006-2011): Skateboarding dogs was the [term people used to] be derogatory about the kind of content that was there. There was a lot more content than skateboarding dogs.
Lonelygirl15
June 2006
Bree, a 16-year-old who broadcasts from her bedroom, becomes YouTubes most popular creator. It turns out shes fictional, and her videos develop into a serialized science-fiction story.
Chen: A video of [soccer star] Ronaldinho juggling a ball off a goalpost was one of the first videos in 2005 that really took off.
Botha: We reached out to the person who uploaded it. It turned out to be one of the marketing people at Nike. Chad, Steve, and I flew up to Oregon to meet them. To me, it was a very interesting window into how brands would use this platform, and it wouldnt just be Americas Funniest Home Videos done on the internet.
In August 2006, YouTube hit the Comscore Media Metrix top-50 ranking of the largest web properties. Still wincing from their encounters with Napster and other file-sharing services widely used for piracy, media companies eyed the new phenom warily, though some chose to engage with it. Unauthorized sharing of copyrighted content abounded.
Jack Flanagan, EVP, Comscore (2002-2010): When those reports came out, people would jump into them immediately just to see how they ranked. The fact that it was the first time that YouTube broke into the top 50 was just huge accomplishment.
Michael Fricklas, general counsel, Viacom (2000-2017): It had started to become pretty well known in the movie and television industry that there was this new pirate site.
Maxcy: I remember talking with a very, very, very large studio down in L.A. This one particular individual said, We love YouTube. We think this is really going to help our business, particularly from a promotional standpoint. But when I leave this room, I’m going to have to say, loudly in the hall, that we’re going to reserve the right to sue you.
Chen: Even Lady Gaga playing in the background is technically copyrighted content if its more than a few seconds. We were very aware of the Napster issues.
Zahavah Levine, YouTube general counsel, chief counsel (2006-2011): Many users were uploading videos of themselves, either alone or with friends, singing songs or dancing to music playing in the background, or maybe of their kid dancing in their living room to music playing in their house.
Hecox: One of our first videos, the Pokémon theme song music video, quickly became the most viewed video on YouTube. It stayed there for about a year and a half before it was removed for copyright infringement. That was a catalyst for us to push ourselves into original content that didn’t have copyrighted content, because we didn’t want to see our videos removed.
Maxcy: Warner Music Group was our first label partner. That really helped us build credibility with some of the other larger labels.
Levine: I still remember sending an email to our main contact at WMG proposing that instead of removing all the user-uploaded videos identified as containing WMG recordings, we instead monetize them with ads and share the money with WMG. To our great surprise and joy, Warner agreed.
Lyor Cohen, Warner Music Group CEO of recorded music (2004-2012); YouTube and Google global head of music (2016-present): [WMG chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr.] had a lot to do with it. He was quite receptive to experimenting and pushing the boundaries. We saw an opportunity to push the accelerator rather than pump the brakes.
Levine: Until that moment, music companies had always negotiated and approved the right to use a piece of music in a video on a song-by-song and a use-by-use basis. This was the first time ever that a music company granted blanket sync rights for an entire catalog of compositions to be used in unknown video content. A historic firstand a huge milestone.
Additional reporting by María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, and Steven Melendez
The entrepreneur Sara Mauskopf has a big voice on X but not in real life. Tens of thousands of people follow her account, where she goes by @sm. Outside social media, she is an introvert who prefers to stay in with her husband and three kids, only attending industry happy hours when she feels its critical for her business.
Allow me to bust the myth, which I have heard repeated by peers and colleagues throughout my working life. The myth? To build a following as a storyteller, you have to be self-centered, self-promoting, or extroverted. In reality, its often the opposite.
It might seem counterintuitive, but Mauskopf gravitates to social media because she doesnt crave the spotlight in her personal life. Self-effacing, witty introverts like Mauskopf are far more commonly found on the internet than you might think.
In truth, you can be thoughtful and low-key yet still find success as a storyteller. Many of the people I interviewed who had the largest followings online were also the humblest. I sum up people like Mauskopf with the term quiet influencer. These are people who arent trying to draw attention to themselves but can find a following online because of their ability to listen and absorb information. When they do share, its to educate, inform, or entertain others, not to build up their egos.
Often, they follow the golden ratio of social posts: the 9:1 rule. I came up with this formula early in my career, when I was starting out on social media. I havent changed it in over a decade, simply because it works, and I share it with companies I advise daily.
So here goes: For every one braggy post related to an accomplishment, milestone, or achievement, share nine that are useful contributions. Think of the contributionsthings that are interesting, valuable, entertainingas earning the brags. Sometimes it is helpful to share something positive that happened on a personal or professional levelI totally understand that but this lets you do it without it coming off as self-absorbed or generic.
Companies are guilty of this toohave you ever scrolled a CEOs LinkedIn profile and viewed nothing but updates about funding milestones, customer wins, and key hires? These are important to share every once in a while, for the purposes of company morale and external validation, but a big opportunity for contribution content has been missed.
If theres anything to remember, its this: To be a successful storyteller, both online and offline, its important to think about what the audience wants and needs. Many of us, as we move through our lives, welcome helpful information that we wouldnt get elsewhereinformation that helps us do our jobs better, learn something new, or feel less alone with the challenges we face. If you can meet that need, youll be a much more engaging storyteller.
Contributions in this vein might include:
A hilarious personal anecdote that will make someone laugh when they need a little bit of levity in their day
An insight about what is really going on in the news beyond the headlinessomething people in the industry would find helpful
A piece of analysis that explains a complicated topic in an accessible way or provides a step-by-step for how to accomplish something that others find challenging
If you are sharing something self-promotional, it can help to provide context around why the milestone means so much to you.
One example: When the Joe Biden administration highlighted Kaitlin Christine, a CEO in my network, for her companys work in breast cancer detection, I helped her share the news with her community. She initially wrote that it was an important milestone, and she described how honored she was without going into much detail. Because I knew a little about her story, I prompted her to share a little bit about how she felt in the moment when the White House reached out and what it meant to her.
Christines company, Gabbi, builds breast cancer risk detection software. She started it after losing her mother to the disease at a young age. After getting screened herself, Christine ended up getting a double mastectomy given her profile (genetics, family history, and so forth). So, to hear from the Biden administration felt like her lifes goals were being realized and her mother would have been truly proud. Once reframed to talk about how personal the experience was for her, her post hit a nerve with her following.
The beauty of reframing content in this way is that even something promotional, like an important new milestone or new hire, can become a useful contribution and/or a moment to truly connect with an extended network. That turns the viewer from a passive liker into a true believer or ally. Likes become comments and reshares and, more importantly, offers of support.
I genuinely appreciate when CEOs talk about not just the great things theyve accomplished in their roles and daily activities but how they got there. Some people refer to this trend as building in the open. Imagine a scenario where a CEO doesnt just post something bland on LinkedIn about the stellar new chief technology officer they just hired.
How about sharing instead how they found this amazing candidate? What tools did they use? Did they retain a recruiterand if so, who? What kinds of interview questions did they produce to assess each candidates technical prowess? What geographies did they focus on? Perhaps this information could even be viewable to anyone via an open document like Google Docs or Notion.
Likewise, rather than announcing a venture capital funding round, a leadership team could talk instead about how they were able to raise money in a difficult funding environment. Authenticity works because it shows vulnerability or provides others with a potential lesson they can use in their own professional pursuits.
If you follow the 9:1 golden ratio, no one will begrudge you the odd self-promotional post that highlights your fantastic accomplishments. Those are important to share occasionally, because the industry may want to know what youre up to. The important thing is to use your voice to give back to your community most of the time. If you are a resource to others, they will follow you, and you will build influence.
Excerpted from The Storytellers Advantage: How Powerful Narratives Make Businesses Thrive. Copyright 2025 by Christina Farr. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Where you live determines a lotespecially if you’re a woman. From physical and mental well-being to unemployment rates to median income, key components of life satisfaction in the U.S. vary drastically based on location. And given that the pay gap also worsens for women, in particular, as they age, the city they call home can be a huge factor in determining earnings and quality of life later on.
A new WalletHub study ranked 182 cities in the U.S. to find out which ones are best for women. The rankings are based on two factors: women’s economic and social well-being, which includes median earnings, unemployment rate, and job security; and women’s healthcare and safety, which looks at access to abortion, the quality of women’s hospitals, and suicide rates.
The top-ranked cities have higher annual wages when adjusting for cost of living; good healthcare; and low rates of poverty for women. The lowest-ranked cities have larger gaps in womens healthcare and fewer opportunities for well-paying jobs.
First on the list is Columbia, Maryland, which has the highest median wage for women at $61,778 and a relatively low poverty rate of 8.2% (the eighth lowest in the U.S.). The unemployment rate for women is just over 4% and nearly a quarter (23%) of businesses are owned by women. While many cities in the study are struggling with women’s healthcare gaps, Columbia has the 10th-best life expectancy for birthing women in the U.S.
Seattle, which ranked second among the cities studied, has the seventh-highest percentage of women-owned businesses, and just 11% of women live below the poverty line. The median salary is $47,792 and only 3.5% of women are uninsured. The city has the 11th-highest life expectancy at birth for women, and crimes against women and suicide rates are comparatively low.
Overland Park, Kansas, is the third-best city for women. While its ranking for healthcare and safety was 58 out of 182, it scored second on economic and social well-being. With a strong economy, only 3.6% of women are unemployed in Overland Park, and it has the second-highest median income for women.
On the other end of the spectrum, a number of cities in the American South ranked poorly. Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Montgomery, Alabama; Gulfport, Mississippi; and Fort Smith, Arkansas, are all in the bottom 10. Ranking worst of all is Jackson, Mississippi, at 176 out of 182 for economic and social well-being and 175 for womens healthcare and safety.
Analysts explained in their report that local policies are massively important in terms of whether women are able to thrive in a certain city. “Government officials need to look at how dismantling of DEI programs will greatly impact gender equity in the workforce and including access to institutional resources (STEM training, for example),” commented Cecilia Rio, an associate professor at Towson University in Maryland. “White women, in particular, benefited a great deal from the implementation of affirmative action in the past in order to open up professional and other traditional male occupations.
Rio added, “It is ironic, for example, to hear Trumps press secretary complain about wokeness when the very policies that came from the social movements of the 60s and 70s knocked down the doors of discrimination and stubborn glass ceilings that kept women out of such prestigious careers to begin with.”
Find the full list of best and worst cities for women here.
The secret of TikToks success since its launch has been its algorithm, which presents videos to its 170 million users in the United States. The ability to synthesize users interests and keep them scrolling has been the reason the app has grown stratosphericallyand is part of the reason why the average user spends more time on the app than watching the average feature film.
But TikToks fate is in jeopardy, with its owner ByteDance reportedly approaching a unique deal involving the Trump administration. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told Fox News over the weekend that the algorithm will also be controlled by America, as part of a deal that would see the apps data held on secure servers operated by Oracle, the large U.S. data company, and run with a consortium reportedly including media mogul Lachlan Murdoch, the son of Rupert Murdoch. Trump’s press secretary outlined more details of the deal today.
The future of TikTok has never looked as grim as now, says Marcus Bösch, a TikTok researcher and consultant.
If the United States does manage to wrest control of the algorithm powering the U.S. version of TikTok and deliver it to American ownership, it would be a win for the White House. It would assuage anti-China hawks, who fear the role the app plays in Americans lifestyles. Their campaign against TikToks continued existence led to the ban on its operation in the U.S., which Trump has repeatedly delayed through executive orders. Without evidence, those who oppose TikTok argue that its algorithm could be weaponized to push anti-U.S. sentiment onto millions of impressionable young users.
But the latest developments could be a Pyrrhic victory. If the U.S. version of the apps algorithm differs in any way from the core apps offering, American citizens could end up with a subpar version of TikTokand abandon it in droves. TikTok did not immediately respond to Fast Companys request for comment.
While the specifics of what a post-deal TikTok would look like are unclear, the current app heavily leverages an algorithm developed over the years by ByteDance, including being trained on predecessor apps. There are fears among experts that this highly honed feed could become one designed solely to promote Trump-favorable content.
A nationalized feed may feel safer or more familiar, but I believe it risks narrowing what people see to American concerns, while filtering out the messy, global commons that once made TikTok so distinctive, says Tom Divon, a researcher studying TikTok at the Hebrew University in Israel.
Others are equally worried about a whiplash effect. I anticipate stark shifts in the FYP algorithm, says Jessica Maddox, associate professor of media studies at the University of Georgia. Maddox has already seen TikToks algorithm tending to promote what she calls daytime TV content during politically tense timesincluding footage of cutesy animals and toddlers or wholesome dances. I see this becoming more of the norm with users struggling to train their algorithm back to their specific interests, Maddox says. TikTok will become more fluffy, general content instead of being known for its hyper-specific niches.
And given that its success has, thus far, stemmed from its ability to offer hyper-specific tailoring of content to its usersin contrast to homegrown tech titans like YouTube and Instagramsacrificing that advantage seems like a great leveler.
Donald Trump has previously said that Chinese President Xi Jinping has approved the terms of the deal, though Chinese and U.S. explanations of the agreement have differed, particularly around the future of the algorithm. According to Chinese state media, China’s Communist Party has said that both parties have reached an agreement to allow ByteDance to retain control of TikToks algorithmsomething Trump appears to have contradicted.
Bösch believes that the apps fate could be similar to X after it was transformed from Twitterone that looks unrecognizable to its core of users but retains a loyal following among a committed minority. And under Trump, what is and isnt allowed could change significantly.
I can foresee political terms that dont align with an administrations political goals being suppressed, Maddox says. Users may also see a change in content moderation guidelines, with objections that could once be overturned on appeal no longer being the case.
Those who have studied TikTok extensively also fear that the quality of content could drop if users desert the platform. This one will most likely be filled with so much AI-infused propaganda, Bösch says. Nice to study. Most likely not so nice to use in private.”
Tech giant Oracle will oversee the security for a licensed copy of the recommendation engine powering TikTok under the terms of a proposed divestment deal, according to a senior official in President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday.
Determining next steps for the algorithm, currently owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance, has been one of the most closely watched issues during negotiations over TikTok’s future.
The Trump administration official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the emerging deal, said they believe the plan will satisfy national security concerns if TikTok divests from its Chinese parent, ByteDance. President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation before leaving office, requiring the Chinese company to sell its assets to an American company or face a ban.
American officials have previously warned the algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way thats difficult to detect.
It wouldnt be in compliance if the algorithm is Chinese. There cant be any shared algorithm with ByteDance, said a spokesperson for the House Select Committee on China.
Oracle would receive a copy of the algorithm and oversee the app’s security operations. The algorithm would be fully inspected and monitored for any abnormal behavior, the senior White House official said Monday.
In a call with reporters, the official later emphasized that the content recommendation formula would be retrained using U.S. data in order to make sure the system is behaving appropriately. It is currently unclear if retraining the copy of the algorithm would essentially create a separate TikTok experience just for domestic U.S. users, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed in a Monday press briefing that TikTok users in the U.S will be able to see videos posted by users in other countries and vice versa.
What the president will sign later this week is an executive order, essentially declaring that the terms of this deal meets Americas national security needs, the White House official said. He notes that China is expected to sign and approve a framework deal for TikTok’s divestment by the end of the week, upon which Trump will issue a 120 day reprieve, giving both nations time to get necessary agreements finalized.
Full details on investors have not been released. However, the official confirmed that the U.S. operations will be a new joint venture with a board of directors that will have a majority of American membersOracle and Silver Lake, a private equity firm, are the only confirmed consortium participants so far.
The White House official also said that under the preliminary dealwhich still requires Chinese officials to sign off on a framework agreementthe United States will not take equity stake in the new venture or have representation on the controlling committee.
Trump, a Republican, has extended the deadline several times as he worked to reach a deal to keep TikTok available. He spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday.
Chris Megerian, Associated Press
Over the past few days, a new subgenre on TikTok has exploded in popularity: RaptureTok.
Its become almost impossible to scroll through the social media platform without encountering content about the Rapturea belief held in some Christian denominations (particularly American Evangelicalism) that believers will ascend to Heaven upon Jesus Christs second coming to the Earth.
While its unclear exactly how this content took hold, its starting point appears to be a prediction from South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela, who said in an interview with the YouTube channel Cettwinz TV on September 9 that he saw Jesus returning in a vision on September 23 or 24. As of this writing, the video has nearly 400,000 views.
A quick search on TikTok reveals dozens of videos of Christian content creators earnestly preparing for the Rapture, while still more are responses satirizing the trend. This isnt the first time that a date has been set for the event in question: past hypotheses have included September 1988; September 6, 1994; and May 21, 2011.
Here are a few examples of the #RaptureTok content thats been dominating feeds.
‘Rapture Trip Tips’
Some of the most referenced RaptureTok videos were made by creator @sonj779, who created a five-part series of Rapture Trip Tips. These include pointers like instructing followers on how to subtly hint to friends that they may be Raptured, as well as one video with more than 500,000 views on what to do when you actually begin to ascend toward Heaven.
Popular streamer Hasan Piker responded directly to @sonj779 in a stream questioning the logistics of the Rapture, which has since been clipped by fan accounts and viewed more than a million times on TikTok. While viewers initially speculated that @sonj779s videos were made in earnest, shes since confirmed via her comment section that they were intended as satire.
TikTok users are preparing for some to be left behind
Some creators, however, do appear to be preparing for the Rapture in earnest.
Creator Melissa Johnston has posted a series of videos, each with thousands of views, detailing how shes prepping for the coming days. The videos primarily detail what shes doing for those left behind after the Rapture, including preparing laminated notecards detailing her beliefs, writing a letter to any remaining loved ones, and purchasing dozens of Bibles from the dollar store.
Commenters are overwhelmingly expressing concern in Johnstons comments, with one response video positing that she may be experiencing religious psychosis.
Former Evangelicals respond
For some creators who no longer identify with their earlier religious beliefs, RaptureTok has struck a nerve. In a video with nearly 200,000 views titled Rapture Terror, creator @veronicaandthebabyboo explains that, as a former Pentecostal pastors daughter, shes nervous about the Rapture despite no longer believing in it.
My entire childhood is just Rapture trauma, she says. Its the reason I cant plan ahead, its the reason I cant save moneybecause the Rapture could come.
She goes on to explain that, as a child, natural phenomena like sun rays and moon beams could be enough to make her question whether the Rapture was imminent. The video has sparked more than 3,000 comments, with viewers sharing their own experiences with childhood Rapture terror.
Granny had a sticker on her dashboard: Warning: Driver of This Car May Disappear at any Moment. I got yelled at because I didnt want to get in the car with her. I. Was. Four, one user wrote. I remember calling random people in my church to see if the rapture happened bc my family was late coming home, another shared. It runs deep.
Danish offshore wind developer Orsted can restart work on the nearly finished Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island, a federal judge ruled on Monday, after President Donald Trump’s administration halted the project last month.
The ruling is a legal setback for Trump, who has sought to block the expansion of offshore wind in U.S. waters. It is a palpable victory for Orsted, which has been losing $2 million a day since the project was halted on August 22.
Revolution Wind is located 15 miles off the coast. Once completed, it is expected to produce enough electricity to power 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Orsted’s U.S.-listed shares were up nearly 9% at $11.60 following the ruling by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth.
The U.S. Interior Department said it would continue to review the project while work proceeds.
“As a result of the Courts decision today, Revolution Wind will be able to resume construction as BOEM (the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) continues its investigation into possible impacts by the project to national security and prevention of other uses on the Outer Continental Shelf,” an Interior spokesperson said.
Attorneys for the Trump administration had argued that the project, located off the coast of Rhode Island, failed to comply with conditions of its permit related to conflicts with national security and scientific ocean surveys.
Revolution Wind disputed those claims.
At the end of a two-hour court hearing in Washington, Lamberth issued a preliminary injunction that blocks the Trump administration from enforcing the order to halt construction.
Lamberth, a senior judge appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, said the Trump administration had offered contradictory reasons for issuing its stop work order, and that the explanations offered weeks after the halt were the height of arbitrary and capricious government conduct.
He also said Revolution Wind had reasonably relied on government assurances that were withdrawn without due process, imperiling a $5 billion investment.
If Revolution Wind cannot meet benchmark deadlines, the entire project could collapse, Lamberth said. There is no doubt in my mind of irreparable harm to the plaintiffs.
Orsted and its joint venture partner Skyborn Renewables had asked for a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit they filed earlier this month challenging the U.S. Interior Department’s stop-work order.
“Revolution Wind will resume impacted construction work as soon as possible, with safety as the top priority,” an Orsted spokesperson said in a statement, adding that it would continue to seek a resolution with the administration.
Rhode Island and Connecticut have also sued the administration over the stop work order.
Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont issued a statement praising the ruling.
“Todays ruling allowing Revolution Wind to resume work is extremely encouraging for workers and our energy future. We will continue to engage with the federal government on a durable path forward for this project and on shared energy priorities, Lamont said.
Jan Wolfe and Nichola Groom, Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court sided again on Monday with Donald Trump, allowing the Republican president to fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commissionfor nowdespite Congress providing job protections for this post.
The court blocked an order by Washington-based U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan that had shielded Rebecca Slaughter, who had sued to challenge Trump’s action, from being dismissed from the consumer protection and antitrust agency prior to her term expiring. The Supreme Court also announced on Monday that it will hear arguments in the case in December.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from Monday’s order letting Trump remove Slaughter for now.
Chief Justice John Roberts on September 8 had paused AliKhan’s orderallowing Trump to keep Slaughter out of her postto give the court more time to consider the administration’s request concerning the judge’s order.
The dispute centers on Trump’s power to dismiss government agency heads covered by removal protections that Congress put in place to give certain agencies a degree of independence from presidential control.
Federal law permits a president to remove FTC commissioners only for causesuch as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in officebut not for policy differences. Similar protections cover officials at other independent agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board.
Slaughter was one of two Democratic commissioners who Trump moved to fire in March. The firings drew sharp criticism from Democratic senators and antimonopoly groups concerned that the move was designed to eliminate opposition within the agency to big corporations.
AliKhan in July blocked Trump’s firing of Slaughter, rejecting the Trump administration’s argument that the tenure protections unlawfully encroach on presidential power. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on September 2 in a 2-1 decision kept the judge’s ruling in place.
The lower courts ruled that the statutory protections shielding FTC members from being removed without cause conform with the U.S. Constitution in light of a 1935 Supreme Court precedent in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. In that case, the court ruled that a president lacks unfettered power to remove FTC commissioners, faulting then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner for policy differences.
The Trump administration in its Supreme Court filing in Slaughter’s case argued that “the modern FTC exercises far more substantial powers than the 1935 FTC,” and thus its members can be fired at will by the president.
‘A story of continuity’
Lawyers for Slaughter in court papers pushed back against that contention, arguing that the FTC’s development over the decades is “a story of continuity, not transformation.”
“As both courts below found and numerous courts have agreed, the FTC has not ‘outgrown’ Humphrey’s Executor,” they wrote.
In May, the Supreme Court allowed Trump’s dismissals at the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Boarddespite the job protections for these postswhile litigation challenging those removals proceeded.
The court in that ruling said the Constitution gives the president wide latitude to fire government officials who wield executive power on his behalf, and that the administration “is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power.”
Citing that rationale in July, the court also allowed Trump to remove three Democratic members of the U.S. government’s top consumer product safety watchdog while a legal challenge to their removal proceeds.
The dissenting liberal justices on Monday criticized the court’s majority for allowing Trump to fire Slaughteras well as other members of independent agencieswithout cause, despite Supreme Court precedent restricting the president’s ability to do so.
“Yet the majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President. He may now removeso says the majority, though Congress said differentlyany member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the three liberals.
The administration has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to allow implementation of Trump policies impeded by lower courts. The Supreme Court has sided with the administration in almost every case that it has been called upon to review since Trump returned to the presidency in January.
Trump’s administration also asked the Supreme Court last Thursday to let him move ahead with firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cooka move without precedent since the central bank’s founding in 1913in a legal battle that could imperil the Fed’s independence.
Since the removal of Slaughter and her fellow Democratic commissioner in March, the FTC has operated for most of that time with three Republicans and no Democratic members.
The agency has pursued conservative agenda items in recent months, including holding a workshop on what it called the dangers of gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. The FTC warned Google that filtering Republican fundraising emails as spam could be unlawful and sought to investigate media watchdogs accused by Elon Musk of helping orchestrate advertiser boycotts of his social media platform X.
John Kruzel, Reuters
Salad and Go, a chain of salad restaurants that are popular in the west and Southwest, has just closed 41 locations in two states.
Known for hearty bowls like the southwest harvest and fajita salads, the chain stands out thanks to its bright orange branding and menu items that are chock-full of quality ingredients. Unfortunately, it seems that it might have over-expanded since its founding in 2013 in Gilbert, Arizona.
The closures are taking place in Texas and Oklahoma, but both of those states will still have open stores, Salad and Go said. Locations in Arizona and Nevada will remain open as well.
Which Salad and Go locations are closing?
According to the company, the following locations have closed as of Friday, September 19:
Texas:
14909 Coit Rd, Dallas, TX 75248
12556 N Beach St, Fort Worth, TX 76244
8900 N Tarrant Pkwy, North Richland Hills, TX 76182
4620 W University Dr, Prosper, TX 75078
9500 Summer Creek Dr, Crowley, TX 76036
4509 W Bailey Boswell Rd, Fort Worth, TX 76179
3064 N Goliad St, Rockwall, TX 75087
355 Lebanon Road, Frisco, TX 75034
11150 US 380, Cross Roads, TX 76227
830 SW Wilshire Blvd, Burleson, TX 76028
3401 Midway Rd, Plano, TX 75093
1102 W Main St, Lewisville, TX 75067
1460 S Ferguson Pkwy, Anna, TX 75409
1201 Flower Mound Road, Flower Mound, TX 75028
430 S FM 548, Forney, TX, 75126
3416 TX-114 Fort Worth, TX 76177
2120 Rio Grande Blvd, Euless, TX 76039
822 W Princeton Dr., Princeton, TX 75047
Oklahoma:
6501 N May Ave, Oklahoma City, OK 73116
2325 E 71st Street, Tulsa, OK 74136
11360 East 96th Street N, Owasso, OK 74055
‘This moment is difficult’
The bigger takeaway is perhaps that the chain was able to maintain a presence in its most popular areasand CEO Mike Tattersfield seems hopeful about the future.
In a statement to Fast Company, Tattersfield explained that while the closures represent a very difficult decision because it impacts team members who have shown extraordinary passion and commitment in serving our guests, they also provide the chain with the opportunity to further invest in the locations that are performing well.
Concentrating our efforts will allow us to strengthen the brand and invest more in improving quality, driving innovation and building community, Tattersfield said in the statement. While this moment is difficult, we know the change will ultimately give us the foundation we need to grow stronger and make delicious, nutritious food accessible to all.
A number of specialty food chains have scaled back their physical footprints this year as foot traffic at quick-service restaurants has slumped.
In 2024, former Salad and Go CEO Charlie Morrison spoke to CNBC about his goals for the company, which resulted in him more than doubling the number of Salad and Go locations.
Consumers have remained price conscious more broadly, with many dining out less. Sweetgreen, a larger and pricier competitor to Salad and Go, saw its same-store sales drop 7.6% in the second quarter of this year after falling 3.1% in the quarter before that.
While Salad and Go had been able to keep much of its overhead costs low due to the fact that it didnt have industrial kitchen equipment on-site, its low $7 target price point for the salads appears to come with its own set of challenges.
NikeSkims was designed to sweat in. Nike announced Monday that its new brand for women created in partnership with the Kim Kardashian co-founded Skims will launch on September 26, and the brand tapped top professional and college athletes to show it off.
[Photo: Nike]
In a short film called Bodies at Work directed by filmmaker Janicza Bravo, stars like Serena Williams, Sha’Carri Richardson, and Chloe Kim, make cameos alongside Kardashian and athletes from USC and UCLA. With shots showing Williams working out with battle ropes, Kardashian jumping rope, and women lifting weights, it’s clear this is a brand that’s being sold as athleisure that’s meant to be worn at coffee runs and the gym.
[Photos: Nike]
NikeSkims will feature seven collections of activewear, including the mid-level compression Matte collection and the breathable, mesh-inspired knit Airy collection, along with seasonal releases. Williams says it “feels like butter on your skin.” There are leggings, biking shorts, sports bras, and more. NikeSkims says all together, the apparel can be worn 10,000 different ways.
[Photos: Nike]
“Our mission is simple: to redefine the rules of women’s activewear,” Kardashian said in a statement. “No more compromises. We’re combining high-performance innovation with sexy, style-forward design for all women who demand both.”
[Photo: Nike]
The brand represents the biggest partnership yet for Skims since Kardashian founded the brand in 2019 with CEO Jens Grede. It comes after collabs with the likes of Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, and North Face. For Nike, the company benefits from Skims star power as it seeks to right course.
[Photo: Nike]
Nike reported a 12% decline in fourth-quarter revenue in its June earnings call and CEO Elliott Hill characterized NikeSkims as a growth play. The brand, he said, was the results of identifying “a consumer need and are creating a new market of style-led product that sculpts and performs.”
By mashing up Nike’s performance and legacy with the Skims style and brand, NikeSkims is building a new market category that it can define and own on its own terms.
[Photo: Nike]
