Arun Maini

Sometime in April 2026, Arun Maini laced his boots, ran onto a football pitch in front of thousands of fans, and scored the winning penalty for YouTube Allstars at the Sidemen Charity Match. It's a sentence that requires no additional context if you've been paying attention to what the internet looks like in 2026.

He also announced that month that he and his wife Dhrisha are expecting their first child in August. He set a Guinness World Record in 2024. He surpassed Apple's YouTube subscriber count. His team, 12 people strong, operates out of his London home - the same kind of authentic, slightly imperfect domestic setting he's used since the beginning, now just considerably larger and considerably more deliberate.

Arun Rupesh Maini was born on October 24, 1995, in Nottingham, England, to Indian-origin parents - his father Dinesh, a doctor, and his mother Malti, both directors at Zenith Cosmetic Clinics. He attended Nottingham High School, collecting 10 A*s at GCSE and 4 A*s at A-level. His father taught him chess as a child; he eventually played for Team England. He arrived at the University of Warwick to study Economics and left four years later with a First Class Honours degree. Then he turned down the PricewaterhouseCoopers job.

That choice in 2017 is the one everyone cites, but it obscures the more interesting fact: he'd already been making YouTube videos for six years by then. He started at 14 with his first smartphone. The channel - Mrwhosetheboss - launched on April 20, 2011. By the time he graduated, it was a career in everything but name.

He was a shy, lanky teenager with acne, filming phone reviews from his attic bedroom. Not a studio. Not a professional setup. His actual attic. He'd stay in that attic until he had roughly 20 million subscribers, which says something about his attachment to authenticity and something else about the size of London houses.

The day before a major A-level exam, his mother looked out the window and found him reviewing earphones in the back garden. "Arun, do you want to revise?" she asked. "I'm doing it later, mom," he replied. He did not clarify what exactly he was doing later, or when later was. He clearly passed the exams.

In 2012, he was hit by a tram on the Nottingham Express Transit. He had forgotten to look right when crossing the road. He was 16. He survived. He kept filming.

In 2015, he uploaded a tutorial showing viewers how to make a 3D hologram projector from a smartphone. It got 21 million views. Quiet, specific, genuinely useful - it became the template for what the channel would do at scale: find the thing people were curious about and explain it better than anyone else was willing to.

The channel covers smartphones, gadgets, cameras, and battery tests - the practical stuff that people actually want to know before spending several hundred pounds on a device. Arun's approach has always been somewhere between consumer guide and entertainment: thorough enough to be trustworthy, watchable enough that you don't fall asleep during the teardown.

There is a fictional phone company called Passionfruit that turns up across his videos like a recurring background character. There is a life-sized cardboard cutout of Rick Astley installed somewhere in his filming space. Nearly every video contains a reference to "Never Gonna Give You Up." These are not gimmicks - they're the texture of a channel that's been running for 15 years and has developed its own internal mythology.

In 2022, a video about Samsung Galaxy devices with swelling battery issues was corroborated by Marques Brownlee, his American counterpart and the closest thing the tech YouTube world has to a peer relationship. In 2024, he built a 2.054-metre replica of the iPhone 15 Pro Max with Matthew Perks, set a Guinness World Record for the largest smartphone replica, and made it look fun. In August of that same year, his subscriber count overtook Apple's own YouTube channel.

His production operation involves 12 full-time people. His monthly views average around 40 million. Revenue comes from advertising, sponsorships, merchandise, and various other streams that come with running something that is, by any reasonable measure, a media company.