How a Former Worker From Italy Became the Most Famous Guy on TikTok

Few of us know this person by his name but almost everyone who has spent some time on the Internet is familiar with his face. Khaby Lame is the guy who captures his reactions to weird life hacks, never saying a single word. In a span of several months, Khaby has become one of the most popular people on the web. Not many other people have ever had such a rapid take-off.

We at Bright Side decided to find out how a simple worker from Italy managed to conquer TikTok and make millions of people all over the world fall in love with what he’s doing.

• Khaby Lame was born on March 9, 2000, in Senegal. When he was one year old, his family moved to Italy, to the town of Chivasso, where they were given social shelter.
• In school, Khaby was keen on football and basketball. After graduating, he started to work as a CNC machine operator for a company that produced digital equipment. In general, he was living quite an ordinary life until the moment he got fired in March of 2020.

• Instead of looking for another job, as Khaby’s father demanded, he returned to his parents’ apartment and decided to make videos for TikTok.
• At the beginning of his time online, his content was not much different from what most bloggers do. In his videos, Khaby spoke the Italian language with subtitles.
• Initially, Khaby was shooting his videos in an ordinary bedroom, which he still shares with his older brother. The TikToker’s room is decorated with the national flag of Senegal and the scarf of his favorite soccer club, Juventus F.C.

• His TikTok channel kept developing and he was already garnering a bit more than 2 million subscribers. But everything changed drastically at the beginning of April 2021 when Khaby started to shoot his reactions to weird and useless life hacks.

• Internet users started to share funny videos and subscribe to his page on TikTok. By the end of that month, Khaby surpassed the famous “dancing millionaire,” an Italian guy known as Gianluca Vacchi. The latter was the most popular person on TikTok in Italy (18.6 million subscribers).

• We just want to remind you that he only had 2 million subscribers at the beginning of April.
• Today, Khaby Lame is incredibly popular on TikTok. The number of his subscribers keeps rapidly growing. At the moment of creating this article (July 6, 2021), he had 84.4 million followers. That’s more subscribers than Kylie Jenner (33.4 mln), Dwayne the Rock Johnson (37 million), and Will Smith (57.8 million) have.
• As of July 6, 2021, Khaby Lame is already taking second place in terms of subscribers on TikTok, though, a couple of days ago, he was still in third place. It seems like very soon he’s going to take first place, having surpassed Charli D’Amelio, a blogger from the US, who has 119.4 million followers. By the way, The New York Times called her “the reigning queen of TikTok.”
• It’s worth noting that Khaby has quite a big number of subscribers on his Instagram account as well, at 27.7 million.
• Khaby earned fame right from his home, without saying any words and using nothing but an old smartphone and improvised means. The absence of speech and focus on facial expressions became his keys to success. People like to watch a young guy “hacking” life hacks that offer complicated and weird solutions to simple issues; and at the end of his videos, Khaby rolls his eyes and spreads his arms as if asking the authors of the life hacks, “Why can’t you guys do it this way?”

• Many celebs and powerful authorities have already noticed Khaby Lame. In fact, the chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has liked one of his posts on Instagram. On May 19, Khaby met with Alessandro Del Piero, the legendary soccer player of the Juventus team.
• Also, Khaby Lame has become sought after by various companies. Apart from marketing contracts (with the manufacturer of Barilla pasta, for example), Khaby gets other offers about collaborations.
• It’s funny that Khaby is known as an Italian TikToker around the world, though officially, he is not an Italian — he doesn’t possess citizenship in this country. Khaby says that the absence of Italian citizenship has never caused any issues for him. It was like this until the moment he got popular and found out that the passport of Senegal complicates the process of getting a visitor visa to the US. He is still going through a lot of paperwork to get citizenship. After that happens, he plans to go to the US where big opportunities are waiting for him.
• Just like other popular people, Khaby doesn’t like to share the details of his personal life. But one thing is clear: he is dating a girl named Zaira Nucci. Khaby once published stories dedicated to his beloved girlfriend on Instagram.

• Khaby Lame earns quite a lot of money, but it’s still not enough to make his biggest dream come true, which is to buy a house for his mother. “Maybe in the future,” he said.

This is how an ordinary guy has become one of the most popular people on the Internet without using any expensive equipment, complex visual effects, or music.

Do you like the funny videos this famous TikToker makes?