How Much Money Ludwig Makes | Inside The Millionaire Empire

Like the only time I've really made dumb gambling decisions is when I have a ton of cash around, so I try to make sure I don't have any money. But I mean the goal is to pull like eight figures. Says most of you know I watch an unhealthy amount of YouTube, and even though I've seen a lot of people come and go, every now and then I notice somebody who really stands out. And lately, no one quite does it like the newest addition to YouTube, Ludwig.

I think the final number was 1.3 million dollars in the month. Even though many people might know him as the most subscribed to streamer of all time, at his core, he is a savvy entrepreneur who was able to leverage his brand into a multi-million dollar business while also being completely transparent about his financial struggles, gambling addictions, and setbacks along the way. So I reached out on Instagram to see if he'd be open to talking about money, personal finance, investing, and how he was able to build his entire business. The next day, he said yes. This is what happened. Enjoy!

"Why did you start streaming?"

I did comedy in college for like a couple of years at Arizona State, and then I moved to LA because I had a job interview at a magazine. I got the job, and then I thought I would do comedy, but it turned out it's really hard to pay bills and be a normal functioning human and eat well and exercise and keep up social relationships, much less travel an hour through LA traffic to go do a stand-up gig for 15 minutes. But I had a friend who's doing a podcast, like we're doing now, but on Twitch, and it did like pretty well; it had like a couple hundred viewers. So I started doing that, and then it picked up a little bit.

"When was the exact moment that you realized you could turn this into a business?"

I didn't really choose when I thought I could do it full time. To me, the number was always ten thousand dollars in my bank account. If I had 10K in my bank account, I could do it full time because I was making just about enough to pay rent, food, utilities, and all that good stuff. And then I got fired at like 7K in the bank, so I was like, I could get a job, save up to 10K, or I could just run it with 7K, which is what I did instead.

"How many hours back then were you working?"

I worked at a vape company. I would sell vapes, and I was ahead of marketing for that company. I had a genius idea—at least I thought—where I had FaZe Banks locked to be the main sponsor, and we were going to reduce the amount of nicotine that he vaped every month for a year until he quits vaping. I went to the CEO of the company, who's like this Chinese guy who owned it all, pitch it to him. He's like, "Love the idea, but we think our products are too bad to promote to that many people because there's too many defects in like one in every 10 product to fail." I was like, "Crazy."

So then I just lame ducked it, and I just sat in my office for the next two months, and I looked at streams and studied streams and would figure out what I would do on stream. Then I'd get home at 6 PM, and I would stream from like 7 to 11, and then I would go to bed, wake up, go to work, do the same thing. So I was probably spending like nine hours thinking about streaming a day and then four hours actually streaming.

"You can't look like this and then ask a girl to go onto a mountain with you by yourself."

"How will this affect LeBron's legacy?"

You know, hey, he can never be the GOAT, but God damn is he good.

"Can you walk us through like an average day?"

Every day I wake up at 9:40, and I take my Vespa and I go to the gym because I work out Monday through Friday, 30 minutes a day, which I think is amazing because it's just short enough that when I look at the clock, I'm done. Then from like usually 11 to noon, I'll have a call or something, and then noon to two is like R&D. So I look at every single streamer who I think is doing something right. I try to see what they're doing, see if there's anything I can pull from it. If I feel zero inspiration, I'll look at YouTubers that I like. If I feel zero inspiration then I'll just look at things that I've done, and I try to think of what I will stream that day in that time block.

And then I'll set up the stream for usually like 4 PM or 5 PM, and then I'll stream for about four hours. Then, you know, watch TV, play League of Legends, hang out with my girlfriend, go to bed.

"How did you start hiring people, and at what point did you start expanding the team?"

My roommate, Slime, is the person who did the podcast that originally inspired me to start streaming. He came into my room one day shirtless in his underwear during COVID, and it was when they had just talked about maybe going back to the office. But he had really liked working from home, and he came to me, and he had a PowerPoint presentation, and it’s: "This is why you should hire me for Ludwig Under Corporation." He went through slide by slide, and it basically summed up to I need him because I wasn't paying my taxes. He would like to work for me because he doesn't want to go back into an office, and so I hired him like that week.

"Are you prepared?"

I'm ready.

"I'm now you mentioned not paying your taxes. What happened there?"

The first year I had, I'd started streaming part-time, and it was the first year I'd ever owed the IRS money. It was one of those projects that if I sat down for like two or three days I could get it done, but I just didn't want to do that because it's so easy when you're streaming. When you go live, you see that you are making money and you see that you're growing, that not doing that feels bad. So I just didn't do it. But Slime ended up doing it, and that was like one of the main things that he did when he came on, and so now the books are clear; the books are good.

"Do you have a budget in terms of like, here's how much I could spend, here's how much…because taxes, I got no clue."

To be honest, I could be getting Michael Jackson and not know it. I get paid a certain amount; like I have a salary, and I pretty rarely go above that unless I have like a big thing I want to buy. I just stay within that amount because I don't spend too much. I think month to month we have 50,000 worth of stuff that I bought in an Amazon and an eBay stream, but the overall company will generally pull, and it's all gone up, so it's hard to say. But I mean the goal is to pull like eight figures—like super low eight figures each year.

So YouTube's the big bulk now because they signed me exclusively, so they just write big fat paychecks. I would say that YouTube ad revenue adds up to about 40 percent of everything; sponsorships is like another thirty percent; and merch, in general items that we sell, adds up to like another thirty percent. The final company that I'm making now is called Off Brand, and that I'm making with my friends—Patriarch, Stans, and Nick Allen—who are all business people to make content for other creators and basically become a producer for other people. Our first project is we made a game show for xQc that'll be airing soon.

"So what's your team right now? How many people is it?"

Yeah, so Mogul Moves is about like 12 employees, and then Mogul Merch is about like three full-time employees. The Yard podcast, we're all co-owners, but it has still two full-time employees, and then the final one is Off Brand, which we're all co-owners, and we have no full-time employees outside of the four owners.

"So how do you decide to divvy your time between doing YouTube, which arguably is extremely profitable, versus diversifying that elsewhere? That's the Mr. Beast route."

Yeah, I met Jim, and he's always like, "You got to be the biggest you can be." I prefer to make things that I think are cool, and that doesn't always necessarily align with being as big as you can possibly be. But most of the time, I'm doing like the daily drivers, like the YouTube videos I know that will be successful, and make sure the Channel's still alive with the goal of doing a bigger project every few months or so, whether it's this project I'm working on with xQc or I'm working on like a chess boxing event this December.

"You asked me before, like what motivates me to keep making content?"

It used to be I had a daily upload streak. I uploaded every day on YouTube for two years straight, and I never wanted to break the streak. So I would be awake at 11:59 PM just trying to get a video out so I could keep that alive; and eventually, I broke it off because the content I was making was worse just so that I could upload videos. I lost motivation for a while after that because I'm like, "Okay, why am I making content now?" And now my main motivator is I have 15 employees, and if the company goes, then they all lose their jobs. So I'm sure it's good to have overhead for that.

"That's right, everyone, everyone give me more money."

The worst purchase I made was a gambling purchase where I paid a professional gambler. I gave him 50,000; he had like this amazing bet that ended up winning, but he didn't put all the money on the bet. He ended up trying to pay a bunch of bookies back, and he was just—he was an addict. I confronted him, and I made him admit that he was scamming me on the phone. “Yes, Ludwig, I scam.”

"Why is that? Why is that word so hard to say?"

I've made a whole video about it, but I ended up not trying to pursue any criminal charges against him because he's just like a dumbass kid who's addicted to gambling, who thought I was his ticket out. But I have a private investigator following him in case he ever does something again.

"How do you deal with your own gambling addiction?"

Oh, I knew early on. I was like 15. I went to Spain with my grandfather. We played a Rapido, and I was just chucking any of the Euros that my family had given me. He was like slow down, and I was like, "It was fun though." And then in college, I got really into online poker, and I ended up running an online poker group for a little bit. But I lost at the start about five thousand dollars, which was everything I had saved up working at Apple. The best way I could manage it at the start was just not having money to gamble, and then now the way I manage it is just not having, again, any cash around. Like the only time I've really made dumb gambling decisions is when I have a ton of cash around, so I try to make sure I don't have any money.

"Just do me a favor, go ahead and subscribe right now."

Let's go ahead! This might be the first ever time where people are gonna feel so bad for you, they're gonna give you money! I think I really enjoy working, and I work a lot, but I also know that the things that make me happy are riding my Vespa, going on a hike, and watching the sunset, and hanging out with my girlfriend. So I try to do as much of that every day as I can, and so even if I'm working nine, ten hours, I'm still finding, you know, the four hours of the day that I can do those things.

"How often do you feel burnt out?"

Once was when I was working at my job full-time and then streaming after, and I would remember going into my driveway. It was weird; I would feel incredibly burnt out after a very successful stream because I felt like I could never live up to what that stream was on the next one, and that would feel demoralizing to go from a thousand years back to 400. So I’d just sit in my driveway, and I wouldn't want to go inside because I knew I'd have to go live.

One time it was really bad—I went live just to say I couldn't go live, and I just sat in my closet for like two hours lying on the floor. Then I had an epiphany that was like, "It doesn't matter. The streams that you do don't matter. Well, only the only thing that matters is the next one." So you just have to, like, put my head down and focus on the next one rather than like rejoicing in a really good one, which will make me feel bad if the next one's not as successful.

Then I felt a bit burnt out recently, probably in the past month or so, and I think that was just from traveling. Sure, traveling's just owned me since I switched to YouTube. If I really feel like I just can't go live and I know that I have a good enough library of streams that I've done that can be YouTube videos, I just won't go live, and I think that's fine because there are things that I can do that aren't streaming now that are helping the YouTube channel or helping other businesses that make me feel productive, make me feel fulfilled, and I don't need to grind another six hours.

I'm very accepting that this can all and will all go to it one day, and I'm just waiting for that day to come. But when that day comes, I think I'll be happy, and I'll be fine.

"What is your biggest insecurity?"

Every single video and every single stream I make, even if I'm like incredibly proud of it, is something that will die very quickly in comparison to most forms of media. And so I would like to make a form of media, whether it's a book or a TV series or a movie one day that will last longer, and I can be more proud of and be more justified in that pride. I think the like button is a fake metric. What isn't a fake metric is not just hitting the subscription button, but the bell. That is a very important metric, and that bell will determine how well the video performs in the first hour, which will help the video perform for the next few days. So do that, and if you want to do the like thing to make this guy happy, then do it too.