By Jim Geraghty
Friday, April 24, 2026
Hasan Doğan Piker was born on July 25, 1991, in New
Brunswick, N.J., to Turkish parents. Many online biographies say Piker “grew up
in Istanbul,” but Piker described spending part of his childhood in the Turkish capital of Ankara. In 2018, Piker posted a
picture of himself in his high school years, riding a show horse.
His father, Mehmet Behçet Piker, spent 24 years working
at Sabancı Holding, rising to the board of directors and position of vice president. Sabancı
Holding is one of Turkey’s largest business conglomerates, with a net
asset value of $10.5 billion in 2024. Piker’s father was also a founding
member of the Future Party in Turkey, formed in 2019.
Piker disputes the notion that he grew up wealthy and
privileged; in November 2025, Piker claimed
that his father “went broke by the time I got to college, and I was broke
for the first decade after college.” Apparently it was the kind of “broke” that
could afford a Equinox gym membership in 2013, which cost $133 to $142 a month with a separate $175 initiation fee;
Piker likely means “broke” as a synonym for “not earning as much money as I
would like.”
Hasan Piker’s uncle is Cenk Uygur, a leftist commentator
and co-founder of The Young Turks, a progressive news organization. Hasan
joined as an intern in 2013; in a later interview, Piker described himself as a “nepo baby,” a term for a
beneficiary of nepotism. Within three years, he pitched his uncle’s
organization on the idea of his hosting his own show, The Breakdown. For
several years, Piker created videos discussing topics such as how Florida
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum “DESTROYED” his Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis. (You may
have noticed that Governor DeSantis, reelected with almost 60 percent of the
vote, was not destroyed.)
By 2018, Piker was posing with Playboy bunnies at a Playboy party
thrown by Cooper Hefner, the heir to the magazine’s fortune, for the White
House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. (Mind you, Piker boasts that
he is a feminist; in 2021, he said during his program, “I’ve gone to a brothel, Artemis,
in Berlin, and had sex with the workers there.”)
During Trump’s first term, Piker gained a wider audience
from having clubby interviews with some of the most progressive elected
officials in the Democratic Party. In October 2020, Piker held a virtual voting
initiative with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, where
they played the video game Among Us. The following month, Piker was the
subject of a glowing New York Times profile written by . . . Taylor Lorenz. (By November 2025, Lorenz would be quoted in profiles of Piker as “a friend of Piker’s.”)
A 2021 data breach of Twitch’s finances revealed that Piker
had been paid a bit more than $2.8 million since 2019, or roughly $1 million
per year.
That same year, Piker purchased a 3,800-square-foot home
with five bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms located in the Beverly Grove neighborhood
of West Hollywood, Los Angeles, for $2.74 million. In 2022, Piker purchased a $200,000 2022 Porsche Taycan Turbo S.
(Piker graduated Rutgers in 2013 and described himself as
“broke for the first decade after college.” That would be until 2023.)
Estimating an individual’s net worth is tricky; even the
limited disclosure of Piker’s Twitch earnings and home price don’t give a full
picture of his income, assets, liabilities, or debts. But for what it’s worth,
some websites have calculated Piker’s net worth at $8 million; one
site did back-of-the-envelope math of his known subscribers and estimated
revenue per subscriber, and calculated he made about $217,000 per month. Other
estimates put his monthly
streaming earnings in a range from $127,000 to $173,000 per month.
He co-founded the athletic brand “Himbo Fitness.”
It’s Piker’s God-given right to make as much money as he
likes in America’s free-market economy, but it does seem more than a little
hypocritical for a self-described socialist who constantly denounces the greed
of “the rich” to be enjoying such a wildly lucrative income and luxurious
lifestyle.
In 2022, Piker accused Amazon of “trying to force Twitch to squeeze more
revenue out of top content creators.” Amazon bought Twitch in 2014; Piker began
streaming on Twitch in March 2018. Interestingly, for a man who regularly
denounces the greed of billionaires, Piker rarely discusses Amazon’s founder,
Jeff Bezos. (Bezos owns the Washington Post. I write a
column for the Post, and I sell my books through Amazon, so technically both Piker and
I are part of the terrible Bezos capitalist menace.)
The Harry
Walker Agency, Piker’s speaker’s bureau, describes Piker as a “journalist”
known for his “honesty.” In July 2024, Alex Mahadevan, who works to debunk
misinformation as the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, told the New York Times that Piker “shares as much
misinformation as anyone on the right.”
In October 2024, New York Times published its second glowing profile about Piker, declaring that programs
like Pikers are “an increasingly popular place for people to discuss current
events, with some streamers turning into de facto pundits, offering their takes
on the news for hours on end every day.”
By April of this year, Piker was the subject of his third overwhelmingly positive New York Times profile
in six years. The headline was, “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the
‘Manosphere’” and gushed, “Hasan Piker pumps iron, likes weapons and wears
pearls. His brand of masculinity has won him many fans online — and has been a
useful vehicle for his politics.” (I have no doubt Piker thinks of himself as
anti-establishment, and yet you can’t get much more “establishment” than the New
York Times, and the Times clearly adores him.)
In that third profile, Times readers learned,
“Piker, an avowed socialist, is just as at ease dressing in French maid drag as
he is on a basketball court. . . . This fluency between culture and ideology
has led many to brand Mr. Piker a Joe Rogan of the left — if Mr. Rogan had a
mop top and painted his nails.”
(Mind you, Joe Rogan supported
Bernie Sanders in 2020. Rogan endorsed Trump in 2024, but has grown
increasingly critical in Trump’s second term over the Jeffrey Epstein files, saying that Trump’s deportation policies risked turning the country
into “monsters,” and claiming Trump went to war against Iran “because of Israel, I guess.” While Rogan was always
politically idiosyncratic, you can make a strong case that the “Joe Rogan of
the left” is . . . Joe Rogan.)
Almost every profile of Piker feels the need to emphasize
his appearance, on a level comparable to Gavin Newsom. The Times swooned, “He is, by conventional
standards, a very handsome man. He is 6 feet 4 inches tall and built like a
professional athlete, with a square jaw, a beard and a head of thick dark
hair.” (In December, The Guardian gushed that Piker was “tall, muscular, fashionable and
handsome — far too alpha to fit lefty stereotypes.”)
Throughout his career, Piker has stood out for saying the
sorts of things that once were fodder for “cancel culture,” or at least
negative consequences for a person in the public eye. Most infamously, Piker said
on his program in 2019 — before his rise to fame and fortune, “America
deserved 9/11, dude. F*** it, I’m saying it. . . . We f***ing totally brought
this upon ourselves, dude. Holy s***. We did. We f***ing did.”
In October 2024, Democratic Representative Ritchie
Torres, who represents the Bronx in Congress, wrote to Twitch’s management about Piker’s comments, among
them:
Mr. Piker has all
but exposed himself as an apologist for the sexual violence and savage rapes of
October 7th. “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t
change the dynamic for me,” Mr. Piker declares before finally admitting that
“Palestinian resistance” (his euphemism for terrorism) is not perfect.”
Mr. Piker has said
he has “no issue” with Hezbollah, the world’s the most heavily armed terrorist
organization in the world, and has given a platform to a suspected terrorist
from the Houthis. The US government has declared Hezbollah a Foreign Terrorist Organization
(in the case of the former) and the Houthis a Specially Designated Global
Terrorist group. . . .
Outside the
context of October 7th, Mr. Piker has even joked and mused about men
date-raping women on a college campus and has posted an image of a handgun on
top of a United States Senator in what appears to be open invitation to gun
violence against a sitting elected official. Inviting one’s followers to shoot
an elected official, whether it be done in earnest or in jest, is the kind of
threat that warrants serious attention from federal law enforcement.
When he is not
joking and musing about rape, Hasan Piker alternates between rape denial and
rape apologia. He either denies the sexual violence of 10/7 or he denies that
it matters. Mr. Piker once described the sexual violence of 10/7 as “rape
fantasies” or “rape hallucinations.”
Remember, Piker describes himself as a feminist. Links to
the video clips of Piker making these statements can be found in the notes to
the Torres letter, here.
You might think that statements like, “It doesn’t matter
if rape happened on October 7” or “Let the streets soak in their red-capitalist
blood” might preclude Piker from appearing on high-profile programs or
appearing with prominent Democratic officials. You would be wrong.
Earlier this month, Michigan Democratic Senate candidate
Abdul El-Sayed held campaign events with Piker on the campuses of Michigan
State University and the University of Michigan. Asked about Piker’s “America
deserved 9/11” comment, El-Sayed said that Piker’s comments had been taken “out of context.” (Take a moment to try to imagine
the context where “America deserved 9/11” is not morally reprehensible.)
Piker proved to be a sufficiently controversial figure
for the Board of Trustees of Michigan State University, and President Kevin
Guskiewicz to offer a vague and extremely softly worded criticism of him.
“We recognize that recent comments attributed to a
speaker coming to campus, who the university did not invite, have caused pain
and concern, particularly among members of our Jewish community. Antisemitism
and discrimination of any kind is unacceptable and inconsistent with our
institutional values and has no place in a community grounded in respect,
inclusion and dignity.” Take that!
About two weeks ago, Piker appeared on
the Pod Save America podcast and was interviewed by Jon Favreau,
former director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama, about his past
comments about Hamas:
Favreau: I
want to stay in the theme of violence just for a minute, because I think it
connects to another comment of yours that’s been circulating. This is one from
January. ‘Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial
apartheid state of Israel.’
Piker: I
stand by that.
Favreau: Well,
so I will say this is the one that bothered me most when I first heard it, and
I remember having a reaction to it when I first saw it in January. Because I
think even if you believe what happened in Gaza is genocide, and what’s
happening in the West Bank is apartheid, those are different claims from “Hamas
is a thousand times better.” Because Hamas is an organization that has
massacred, raped, kidnapped civilians on October 7th. They’ve also been
catastrophic for Palestinians by almost every measure. Their governance,
corruption, they made choices they knew would result in mass civilian death of
their own people. So, my question is, when you say, “Hamas is a thousand times
better,” do you actually mean that, or is that a rhetorical move or like a solidarity
signal? Like, what—
Piker: What
I mean, it’s all of the above. I do mean it. I think it’s a rhetorical move
because it frustrates a lot of people. I’ve also said, I’m a harm reduction
voter. I’m a lesser evil voter, and therefore I would vote for Hamas over
Israel every single time.
Piker is not asserting moral equivalence between Hamas
and Israel; he is asserting Hamas’ moral superiority to Israel.
During the interview, Piker also contended, “The biggest terrorist
internationally is the Republican Party.” Besides all his other wrongdoing,
Piker is really snubbing al-Qaeda, ISIS, Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam, Tehrik-e-Taliban
Pakistan, Al-Shabaab . . . those are all terrorist groups that worked hard
to compete for the world terrorism championship. The Republican Party didn’t
even make the top rankings in most polls. Perhaps we need a playoff system.
Oh, and he uses a shock collar on his dog.
Piker doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but he
articulates the raging id of the hard left, demonizes wealthy people while
raking it in and driving his Porsche around West Hollywood, excuses away the
world’s worst Islamist terrorists, including the al-Qaeda terrorists who
committed 9/11 while insisting that Israeli victims of the Hamas attacks are
describing their rape fantasies.
No doubt, many Democratic presidential candidates will
court him for his endorsement between now and the 2028 primaries.
ADDENDUM: Our Kamden Mulder reports, “The Minnesota House Fraud
Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee called Omar to testify
at a hearing on Tuesday, but the committee’s chairwoman told National Review
that Omar ‘completely ghosted’ state lawmakers.”
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