Khaby Lame: The King of TikTok

Simon Jack (0:06)

It's April 2021, and somewhere on TikTok, a man is showing us how to peel a banana with a knife.

Zing Tsjeng (0:13)

Instead of just pulling back the skin, he's awkwardly slicing it off in a tutorial, which turns a perfectly simple task into a complicated life hack.

Simon Jack (0:21)

The process is elaborate, unnecessary, and quite frankly, deeply silly.

Zing Tsjeng (0:25)

The video then cuts to a young man sitting at a table, and without saying a word, he turns to the camera with a world-weary expression.

Simon Jack (0:32)

He then picks up a banana of his own and peels it normally before raising his palms in the air as if to say, well, obviously, no dialogue, no punchline, unless the punchline is that humanity itself has lost the plot. The video only lasts a few seconds, but everyone everywhere understands it, and it will help turn this recently unemployed factory worker into a social media superstar.

Zing Tsjeng (0:54)

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Simon Jack (1:00)

We take them from zero to their first million and then from a million on to a billion.

Zing Tsjeng (1:04)

My name is Zing Tsjeng and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

Simon Jack (1:07)

My name is Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor, and this is the episode where it finally convinced me that I don't really understand the world.

Zing Tsjeng (1:15)

In what way? Have you seen this video before?

Simon Jack (1:17)

I have seen this video and others like it, but I wasn't familiar with the name of this person, Khaby Lame, or as he's sometimes called, the king of TikTok.

Zing Tsjeng (1:27)

That's right, because right now, he's the world's most followed person on the platform. He's got over 162 million followers there and another, you know, piff-linked 78 million on Instagram.

Simon Jack (1:37)

Unbelievable numbers, all from these essentially silent films, which I have to say, when I saw his name come up as one of the ones we're going to do, I didn't recognize the name, but when I looked closer, some of these videos I have actually seen, they've crossed my timeline.

Zing Tsjeng (1:51)

He's sort of like the new generation Mr Bean, another kind of superstar in comedy who basically made millions for Rowan Atkinson, the actor, without ever saying a proper word.

Simon Jack (2:02)

Yeah, or maybe Charlie Chaplin. And the beauty of the fact that he almost never speaks is that it's instantly recognizable, and understandable around the globe.

Zing Tsjeng (2:11)

Exactly. No catchphrases, no punchlines. Khaby would just do a raised eyebrow, a shrug, maybe his palms raised quizzically skywards.

Simon Jack (2:19)

And yet in this case, silence is golden. Because in 2023 alone, his management team secured him multi-million dollar deals with the likes of Google, Pepsi, the US insurance giant State Farm.

Zing Tsjeng (2:30)

His posts of Lionel Messi, David Beckham, Ed Sheeran. He's walked the red carpet at the Oscars. And here's the plot twist for a guy who's built this entire empire out of staining silent, trying to figure out what he's actually worth is a pretty noisy, complex story.

Simon Jack (2:45)

Sure is. So it's time we find out how Khaby Lame, king of TikTok, got to wear that crown.

Zing Tsjeng (2:54)

Serene Khaby Lame was born on the 9th of March 2000 in Dakar, Senegal. When he was one, his family moved to Italy, settling in Chivaso, a small industrial town that isn't far from Turin. But despite spending his entire upbringing there, Khaby grew up without an Italian passport. Under Italian law, children born to foreign parents can only apply for citizenship when they turn 18, and only if they've lived there continuously.

Simon Jack (3:17)

Yeah, it must be hard, I think, to grow up somewhere, and you speak the language, you feel culturally part of that country, and you're not officially belong.

Zing Tsjeng (3:24)

And I wonder if that's what made Khaby come upon this idea of using kind of wordless comedy in his sketches rather than Italian.

Simon Jack (3:32)

Something that would fit in anywhere in the world. Details about his family life are pretty hard to pin down. We know he has three siblings, his parents work long hours to keep the family afloat. They all live together in a small apartment in a social housing project. And Khaby told one Italian newspaper, even though we had very little, we were still happy and content playing in the yard.

Zing Tsjeng (3:51)

He struggled at school and he's spoken about having both dyslexia and dyscalculia, saying the latter makes it hard for him to work with numbers, which is kind of surprising given what's to come for his fortunes.