Logan Paul


Logan Alexander Paul is an American influencer, professional wrestler, entrepreneur, boxer, and actor. As a wrestler, he is signed to WWE, where he performs on the Raw brand and is a member of The Vision stable. He is a former WWE United States Champion. He has over 23 million subscribers on his YouTube channel Logan Paul Vlogs and has ranked on the Forbes list for the highest-paid YouTube creators in 2017, 2018, and 2021. He is the co-founder of beverage company Prime and snack brand Lunchly. Paul has also run the Impaulsive podcast since November 2018, which has over four million YouTube subscribers. In December 2025, Paul was appointed General Partner of the venture capital firm Anti Fund, which was co-founded by his brother Jake Paul.
In 2013, Paul gained a following by posting sketches on the now-defunct video-sharing application Vine. He registered his first YouTube channel, TheOfficialLoganPaul, on October 18, 2013, where he started posting regularly following the closure of the Vine app. He later created the Logan Paul Vlogs channel on August 29, 2015, which has since become his most-subscribed YouTube channel. As of August 2023, the channel has received 23.6 million subscribers and almost 6 billion views.
As an actor, Paul's television and film work includes guest appearances on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Bizaardvark, and roles in films The Thinning and The Thinning: New World Order. He has also explored other avenues; he released his debut single "2016" in 2016, and fought English media personality KSI in a white-collar boxing match in 2018. The bout ended in a majority draw. In the 2019 rematch, which was a professional bout, KSI won by split decision. In 2023, Paul won his first professional boxing match when he defeated Dillon Danis via disqualification. Paul also transitioned to exhibition boxing in 2021, fighting Floyd Mayweather Jr. in a non-scored bout. After a couple of brief appearances in WWE in 2021, he made his professional wrestling debut as The Miz's tag team partner in a tag team match at WrestleMania 38 in April 2022, which they won and Paul received praise for his performance. He then signed a contract with WWE in June that year and later won the WWE United States Championship in November 2023. He adopted the WWE nickname the Maverick, which is a reference to his clothing line and his media company.
Paul has been involved in several controversies, most notably in relation to a trip to Japan in December 2017, during which he visited the Aokigahara forest, filmed himself finding the corpse of a suicide victim, and uploaded the footage to his YouTube channel. Others include his promotion of scams and failed ventures, including CryptoZoo—in which he failed to compensate more than $1.5 million to investors despite promising to do so.

Early life

Logan Alexander Paul was born in Westlake, Ohio, on April 1, 1995, to Pamela Ann Stepnick and realtor Gregory Allan Paul. He claims Irish, Welsh, Jewish, French and German ancestry. He was raised in Westlake with his younger brother Jake, who is also a media personality. Paul began creating videos for a YouTube channel called Zoosh when he was 10 years old. He attended Westlake High School, being named The Plain Dealer's All-Star football linebacker in 2012, and qualifying for the state-level Ohio High School Athletic Association 2013 Division I Wrestling Individual Championships.

YouTube career

2015–2017: YouTube beginnings

By the time Paul began attending college, his YouTube channel had attained a modest following via the platform Vine. He took classes in industrial engineering at Ohio University before dropping out in 2014 to pursue a career as a full-time social media entertainer in Los Angeles, moving into an apartment complex in the city with other Vine stars.
Paul rose to fame as a member on the Internet video sharing service Vine. In February 2014, he had over 3.1 million followers on various social media platforms. By April 2014, he had attained 105,000 Twitter followers, 361,000 Instagram followers, 31,000 likes on his Facebook page and about 150,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. A YouTube compilation video of his Vine work garnered more than four million views the first week it was posted. In 2015 he was ranked as the 10th most influential figure on Vine, with his six-second videos earning him hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. By that October, his Facebook videos alone had more than 300 million views. Logan refers to his following as the "Logang", a portmanteau of "Logan" and "gang".
In early 2015, Paul appeared on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He also appeared on the Fox TV series Weird Loners, where he appeared in the role of the Paul Twins. He starred in two episodes of the Freeform series Stitchers. In 2016, he starred in the YouTube Red movie The Thinning opposite Peyton List. In early 2016, Paul trained with drama coaches and the comedy troupes The Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade. Paul wrote the screenplay for an adult comedy, Airplane Mode, which has been described as "American Pie for Gen Z", and by Paul himself as "Expendables with Internet stars". The film was originally planned to be released in 2017, but was eventually released on August 2, 2019, after being delayed. He was also involved in a number of advertising campaigns, including for Hanes, PepsiCo, and HBO. In 2016, Comcast purchased a short form digital TV series from Paul called Logan Paul VS.
In February 2017, Dwayne Johnson released a YouTube video entitled "Logan Paul has been cut from, like, all of The Rock's movies", in which he informs Paul that he has been cut from all of Johnson's films, and subsequently consoles him by making him the "ambassador" to his upcoming Baywatch feature film. On November 23, 2017, Paul released his new single, "No Handlebars", a track that draws heavily on an interpolated sample of the song "Handlebars" by the American alternative hip hop group Flobots. The song was heavily criticized for its perceived sexual objectification of women, including a scene in its music video where Paul rides several women like a bicycle. Flobots frontman Jamie Laurie lambasted Paul for both the "sexist" lyrical content of the song and for unauthorized use of the sample, calling him the face of "douchebag entitlement". Laurie would later go on to release a track with lyrics deriding Paul, titled "Handle Your Bars". Paul did not respond to Laurie's comments nor the backlash towards "No Handlebars". After Flobots sued Paul for copyright infringement in 2019, he deleted the song from YouTube.

2017–2018: Suicide forest controversy

On December 31, 2017, Paul uploaded a vlog to his YouTube channel depicting the corpse of a recently-deceased man who had died by hanging himself in Aokigahara at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, known as the "suicide forest" due to its infamy as a suicide site. Initially intended to be part three of his "Tokyo Adventures" series, Paul and his group had planned to camp in the woods, but in response to finding the corpse, decided to notify the authorities and cancel their plans. The video gained 6.3 million views within 24 hours of being uploaded. Paul's video depicting the corpse, whose face was censored, and his group's reactions to it, were criticized by celebrities and politicians. In addition, he was accused by other members of the YouTube community of being insensitive to suicide victims. He was also criticized for other misbehavior he was captured taking part in during the trip, including climbing onto a moving forklift truck at the Tsukiji fish market, removing his clothing on a crowded street and then proceeding to fight with one of his traveling companions, and throwing a giant Poké Ball plush toy at passing citizens, including an officer of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. Several petitions were posted to Change.org urging YouTube to delete Paul's channel in light of the controversy, the largest of which received more than 720,000 signatures as of February 9, 2018.
As a result of the backlash, Paul removed the video from his YouTube channel, following up with a written apology on Twitter on January 1, 2018. The following day, on January 2, a subsequent video apology was released to YouTube in which Paul admitted to making "a severe and continuous lapse in judgement" and described his behavior as a "coping mechanism", asking his fans to stop defending his actions in the process. On January 9, YouTube issued a statement via Twitter condemning Paul's video: "It's taken us a long time to respond, but we've been listening to everything you've been saying. We know that the actions of one creator can affect the entire community, so we'll have more to share soon on steps we're taking to ensure a video like this is never circulated again." On January 10, YouTube announced it was removing Paul's channels from Google Preferred, its preferred ad program, and New World Order, the sequel to his YouTube film The Thinning, was placed on hold, with the airing of Logan Paul VS. being halted as well. He was also cut from season 4 of the YouTube Red series Foursome and the role of Alec Fixler was terminated.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer postponed the release of the film Valley Girl, featuring Paul, following the controversies. On January 15, Paul was seen at LAX by reporters from TMZ. He said that he has learned a lot from his mistakes and believes he has been treated "fairly". When asked whether he deserves a second chance, Paul replied, "Everyone deserves second chances, bro." In response, he donated $1 million to suicide prevention agencies, a quarter of which is going to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. In response to the controversy, Paul hired Mike Majlak, a former marketing manager at furniture company LoveSac, to "make sure that no bad things happen" and work with Logan to help improve his reputation. On February 4, Paul officially returned to his daily vlogs on YouTube after taking a 3-week-long hiatus. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said on February 12 that Paul did not violate YouTube's three-strike policy and did not meet the criteria for being banned from the platform. In the wake of the controversy regarding the suicide video, Maverick Apparel, a brand for juniors and children, threatened Paul with legal action for giving his clothing line a similar name, believing shoppers are confusing their line with Paul's, resulting in a deep decline in sales.