YouTube Took Ad Money Away From YouTuber SteveWillDoIt and the Other Nelk Boys

The net worth of SteveWillDoIt, the YouTuber born Stephen Deleonardis, has become a talking point online lately, especially after he said he bought fellow YouTube star Kyle Forgeard an Audi RS7, which starts at an estimated $116,000. “How much money does Steve have?” one Redditor wrote after the Audi stunt. “I hope he doesn’t blow it all up and end up broke when he gets older.”

A commenter on that Reddit post expressed similar concerns. “Steve lives an excessive life with what appears to be zero ability to save for the future,” that commenter wrote. “He’s not going to be making this kind of money forever, and if he’s able to, he would be a part of a very small group of people. … Between his gambling and drinking, how can this end well?” Here’s what we know about Deleonardis’s financial situation.

The website Net Worth Spot estimates that Deleonardis’s net worth is $2.55 million or even as much as $3.58 million with other revenue sources in play. Given Deleonardis’s popularity—he has 3.47 million YouTube subscribers at the moment and more than 252 million views—the site speculates that he’s earning $638,420 to $1.15 million in yearly ad revenue.

The 22-year-old’s YouTube bio boasts that he’s the “healthiest man alive,” but that might be a joke considering his consumption of food and alcohol. One of his recent stunts involved eating 30 cheeseburger patties from In-N-Out. His other “crazy challenges” entailed eating five taco shells filled with mayonnaise and drinking a blender full of tequila. According to Vice, Deleonardis started posting his videos to YouTube after Instagram deleted videos of him drinking whole bottles of liquor.

Deleonardis also belongs to the Nelk Boys creator collective, which Forgeard leads. In a profile of the group last month, The New York Times reported that YouTube demonetized the Nelk Boys’ account in 2020 after they encouraged viewers to disregard COVID-19 safety protocols.

“Every video, we’re swearing, we’re doing some stuff that could be questionable or illegal, we’re making sexual references or drug references,” Forgeard told the newspaper. “So we were making no money on YouTube at all.”

In Oct. 2019, Deleonardis revealed in a YouTube video that pop star Demi Lovato had direct-messaged him on Instagram with a warning about his alcohol consumption. “This is 100 percent no judgment—you do you. I just see you’re doing this s--t for likes, fame, and laughs, but at what price?” Lovato wrote in their message. “You CAN take it too far. So be careful.”

They went on: “Even if you aren’t using drugs with drinking, alcohol poisoning is no joke. This s--t could easily kill you, if not immediately, definitely later on. Is all this really worth it?” After reading Lovato’s messages in the video, Deleonardis chugged two bottles of Corona at the same time.