Business

This 22-year-old college dropout makes $700,000 a year from “AI slop” people sleep through

Published

3 hours ago

December 30, 2025

The modern internet is less interested in demanding attention than in simply occupying it.

Adavia Davis understands that better than perhaps anyone else. Since dropping out of Mississippi State University in 2020, the 22-year-old has built a thriving content-creation business out of what has come to be called “slop”— that high-volume, AI-generated background noise that thrives in the gaps of our focus. Davis’ most successful videos aren’t meant to be watched, shared, or even remembered. Often, Davis told Fortune, his viewers are asleep.

Davis has assembled a sprawling network of YouTube channels that operates as a near-autonomous revenue engine, requiring only about two hours of his oversight a day. He currently runs five active channels, but his broader portfolio includes multiple Minecraft channels aimed at children as well as channels devoted to funny-animal compilations, prank videos, anime edits, Bollywood clips, and celebrity gossip. Most lucrative is a “Boring History” channel built around six-hour “history to sleep to” documentaries, narrated by what sounds like a languid David Attenborough.

The channels belong to a genre that has come to dominate YouTube, known as “faceless” content–-videos designed to be scalable, easily replicated. Nearly all of Davis’ videos are generated with artificial intelligence, anchored by TubeGen, a proprietary software pipeline built by his partner, fellow 22-year-old Eddie Eizner, that automates nearly every step of production. Scripts and visuals are generated with Claude, the silky British narration from ElevenLabs, then assembled into long-form videos. The results can run as long as six hours, costing as little as $60 to produce from start to finish.

Davis told Fortune that his network of videos generates roughly $40,000 to $60,000 a month in revenue. His operating costs—primarily small salaried teams overseeing the different niches—run at about $6,500 per month, he added. The margins are 85%-89%, extraordinary by tech standards.

Fortune reviewed screenshots from Davis’ social media analytics dashboards, as well as recent AdSense payout records, which show tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly earnings from individual channels, equating to annual gross revenue of roughly $700,000. He talked to Fortune more about what is turning into his career, how it got started, and why college wasn’t part of the equation for him.

How Davis hacks the attention economy

Growing up on YouTube, Davis was a product of the platform’s golden era. When he was 10 years old in 2014, he said, he would spend six hours a day scripting and editing Minecraft and Fortnite playthroughs. He said he mourns the passing of this era, a time when creators were driven by “a love of the game, not necessarily to sell something.”

But by 2022, the launch of ChatGPT shifted the internet’s market logic. Davis said he saw the writing on the wall early: the era of the personal brand was being eclipsed by the large-scale-content farm. But he was also, frankly, surprised by what turned from a hobby to a side hustle to something resembling a business. “I didn’t start [making content on] YouTube to make AI videos,” he said, adding that it was just for fun at first, but money started coming in from his various channels. “Then, if all my competitors are uploading more than me, and I’m waiting on my scriptwriter to get done, then I’m just falling behind.”

Davis was a 19-year-old college student when he felt the internet world shifting under his feet. He sold his first YouTube channel to a brand, which converted the account into a marketing feed for its product (Davis said he routinely accepts this kind of deal, even if it rarely pays off for the buyer: “they don’t know what they’re doing”). To celebrate, he spent what he describes as the last of his savings on a Tesla Model 3, at the time retailing at $55,000, not leaving any funds for tuition. Davis had enrolled in school largely for the experience, he said, but quickly realized he couldn’t juggle classes and content creation without killing both. “If I stayed in school, I was going to be broke and distracted,” he said. “That was just a setback for no reason.”

Davis turned fully to making YouTube channels with the new AI tools at his disposal, with the internet that he grew up with now gone forever, in his opinion. “The ethics have gotten really, really bad from these higher-up companies that have their number one goal as attention,” Davis said. “Because attention is the number one currency. Whoever has the most influence controls the most.” He described the system that he’s monetized as very “psychological,” even destructive—“trying to destroy minds to make them easier to sell to.”

Davis explained his understanding of the business model as YouTube needing to cater to advertisers, “the puppet masters” of the platform, in order to stay alive. The only way to survive in this system, he argued, is to understand it, or even teach it. (In fact, Davis said that he offers an online course for people looking to supplement their income, including his belief that “social media is a social science.”)

Recent data suggests that so-called “AI slop” has rapidly expanded across YouTube. Researchers at the video-editing company Kapwing found that more than 20% of the videos shown to new users fall into that category. The study further found that channels posting nothing but that AI low-quality content have collectively amassed over 63 billion views, 221 million subscribers, and an estimated $117 million a year in advertising revenue. YouTube, meanwhile, has emerged as a major player in both TV and streaming, with the 2020s marking a turning point in the popularity of podcasts with video, and YouTube’s more traditional TV offerings such as NFL (or, next year, the Oscars) combining with its dominance in user-generated content (UGC) to make it an engagement giant. Melissa Otto, head of research at S&P Global Visible Alpha, previously told Fortune that YouTube’s dominance in UGC is the real reason Netflix is spending so heavily to try to acquire Warner Bros. Disney’s subsequent $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI fits into a similar category, per Nicholas Grous, director of research for consumer internet and fintech at Ark Invest.

Against this backdrop, Davis remains a comparatively small fish: he has built and sold faceless AI-driven channels ranging from roughly 400,000 subscribers to just over one million. Yet, he said his network of videos now averages about two million views per day. “When you understand psychology, everything else just falls into place,” he said.

Over the past several years running channels on YouTube as well as shows on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, Davis said that he’s learned to optimize for social media’s most unforgiving metric: watch time. Some tactics are straightforward. Davis obsessively engineers the opening seconds, or the “hook,” of a video—the bright contrast of colors on screen, the first facial expression or vocal inflection you hear—because that initial moment determines whether a viewer stays or clicks away.

Others are more mischievous. In compilation videos, Davis sometimes turns to shock tactics such as a sudden flash of a spiders on screen for a split second at the beginning, just long enough to make viewers rewind and check whether they actually saw what they think they saw. In short-form clips, he has intentionally misspelled words on screen to bait viewers to pause, comment and correct him, stretching watch time in the process.

“I do everything in my power to trick watch time,” he said. “Because that’s the metric that’s going to pay you at the end of the day.”

The 2027 deadline

So far, Davis has had something of a first-mover advantage, given how early he was to spot the arbitrage opportunity and also his long-developed intuition for the sort of video that performs well.

But now, with AI advancing beyond scripts into video production and further collapsing barriers to entry, competition has grown fiercer. He said the biggest career mistake he ever made was posting a promotional video for TubeGen showing how he made his long-form Boring History sleep videos using AI. Within days, Davis said that he saw scores of copycats posting similar videos, crowding out the niche that he had built and monopolized, until then.

But more threatening than the individual imitators, he said, are the companies with capital. Davis describes himself as “kind of a doomer” about the future of the space, estimating that individual creators have until around 2027 to meaningfully profit from AI-generated long-form YouTube content.

After that, he predicted the “sharks” will arrive: large media companies with the capital to industrialize any format the moment it proves lucrative. “At that point,” he said, “you’re just competing against the big fish.”

Davis pointed to a World War II history channel that he admired, full of thoughtfully produced videos that seemed to come from a student, posting every other day. Once an unnamed media company noticed the niche, it began uploading three times a day. Those sorts of videos cost roughly $110 to produce, he estimated, whereas posting at the media company’s speed would cost over $300. “You can’t compete unless you have the budget,” he said.

Still, he said he was optimistic that he’ll find a way to “seep through the cracks,” as he has for three years now. Rather than inventing new genres, Davis said he looks for small edges inside formats that already work. Most recently, he has been experimenting with a twist on a familiar setup: pairing narrated Reddit posts with looping Minecraft footage—but instead of a classic Reddit story, swapping in narrated horror stories for the “psychopaths,” as he put it, who like to fall asleep to them.

“The proof of concept is there,” Davis said.

But Davis hopes that one day, soon, none of his content will be much in demand at all. As AI content floods the internet and trust erodes, he believes authenticity itself will become scarce,and therefore valuable. He already sees a growing audience for creators who reject heavy editing and algorithmic tricks.

“It’ll get worse before it gets better,” he said, but eventually, “True longevity,” he said, “is going to come within brands and real influencers with real faces.”

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Business

George Clooney moves to France and sends a strong message about the American Dream

Published

8 minutes ago

December 30, 2025

Jace Porter

France has officially granted citizenship to George Clooney, his wife Amal, and their twins, Ella and Alexander, via decrees published in the country’s Journal Officiel. The naturalization confirms that the family’s primary residence is now in France, where they have owned a former wine estate, Domaine du Canadel, near the village of Brignoles in Provence, since 2021.

Clooney has described the property as a farm and the main base for his family life, marking a significant shift away from Los Angeles, the traditional center of his industry and personal brand. For a two-time Oscar winner closely identified with Hollywood, turning a Provençal farm into “home” is itself a strong signal about where he believes his children’s future—and his own equilibrium—can best be protected. But it also amounts to a quiet referendum on the viability of the American Dream, even for the ultra-visible, ultra-wealthy class he represents. His move underscores how privacy, stability, and a less celebrity-obsessed culture have become premium “assets” that some high earners no longer see as reliably available in the United States.

A personal hedge against ‘Hollywood culture’

Clooney has been unusually explicit about why he no longer wants to raise his family in Los Angeles. “I was worried about raising our kids in L.A., in the culture of Hollywood,” he told Esquire recently, adding that he felt they were “never going to get a fair shake at life” there. He further explained that “France—they kind of don’t give a s— about fame,” and emphasized that he does not want his children “walking around worried about paparazzi” or “being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.”

He has also argued that his twins “have a much better life” in France than they would have had in Los Angeles, describing their routine on the farm as screen-light, chore-heavy, and family-centered. In that framing, France is less a romantic escape than a structural solution to the distortions that come with U.S. celebrity culture—and, by extension, a critique of a system that often markets visibility as a reward but delivers surveillance as a cost.

What this says about the American Dream

For much of the 20th century, the American Dream was sold as a package of meritocracy, upward mobility, and cultural centrality: make it in America, and you are at the center of the world. Clooney’s relocation suggests that for some of the people who “made it,” the dream now requires an offshore upgrade. The same U.S. system that enabled him to build wealth and status appears, in his telling, ill-suited to giving his children a “fair shake” or a normal childhood.

By choosing a jurisdiction with strict privacy rules—France has strong protections against photographing children and tighter limits on paparazzi—Clooney is effectively arbitraging regulatory environments to secure non-financial returns: anonymity for his kids and a slower pace of life. That logic mirrors how multinational companies optimize tax or labor regimes, but here the asset being safeguarded is family life rather than corporate profit.

Anecdotal evidence supports the idea that the ultrawealthy from the U.S. are increasingly deciding that their American Dream lies overseas. Ellen Degeneres and Portia De Rossi famously moved to the UK shortly after President Donald Trump was reelected, while Rosie O’Donnell, often a target of pointed attacks from Trump, qualified for Irish citizenship and moved to Dublin. Richard Gere, like Clooney, seemed to move for love, relocating to Spain to be close to the family and culture of his wife, Alejandra Silva. Fashion designer Tom Ford splashed out on a large mansion in London and has begun calling the UK home, while former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has purchased a house in London as well.

The data shows a wider spike in expat movements. The IRS “Expatriation List” (which mainly captures wealthier individuals who meet certain asset or tax thresholds) recorded about 4,820 citizenship renunciations in 2024, up roughly 48% from 2023 and the third‑highest annual total on record. (The top two years on record were the epochal years of 2016, when Trump was elected, and 2020, when the pandemic hit and Trump lost reelection.) Between 2020 and 2024, about 21,000 high‑net‑worth individuals renounced U.S. citizenship, which is roughly 39% of all expatriations reported since this list began in 1996. These figures likely undercount the prominent departures because they only include so‑called “covered expatriates” (people above a net‑worth or tax‑liability threshold) and exclude less‑wealthy renouncers and many who move without giving up citizenship. The New Yorker even wrote an article recently, titled “How to leave the USA,” citing surges in citizenship applications to both Ireland and the UK in particular.

A case study in elite ‘life diversification’

Clooney’s family still maintains ties to the U.S. and the U.K., and the new French nationality comes on top of Clooney’s existing American citizenship, not in place of it. In portfolio terms, the family appears to be diversifying not just its investments and passports but also its exposure to cultural and media risk, shifting the center of gravity to a country where fame carries fewer day-to-day penalties.

For business readers, the move looks less like an indulgent lifestyle play and more like a strategic reallocation of intangible capital: time, privacy, and mental health. If even one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars concludes that the full expression of his “dream” requires decoupling from the ecosystem that made him rich, it raises a sharp question for the U.S.: when success at the very top comes with conditions that drive families to look elsewhere, what, exactly, is the American Dream still promising?

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Business

Beyoncé just reached billionaire status, and her advice for success starts with saying ‘no’ more

Published

39 minutes ago

December 30, 2025

Jace Porter

Beyoncé’s new status as a billionaire is the ultimate endorsement of an idea she came to later in her career: stop overworking and start working smarter. Her evolution from 24/7 grind to boundary-setting strategist tracks directly to what workers and executives are discovering about burnout and sustainable success in today’s economy.

From grind to billionaire

In late 2025, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter joined Forbes‘ billionaire ranks, becoming one of only a handful of musicians—alongside Jay-Z, Rihanna, Bruce Springsteen, and Taylor Swift—to cross the 10-figure threshold. Her wealth is built on stacked revenue streams: blockbuster tours like Renaissance and Cowboy Carter, high-margin merchandise, an owned catalog valued in the hundreds of millions, and Parkwood Entertainment, which lets her keep control of the products she creates.

That portfolio is the compound interest on two decades of disciplined reinvention—from Destiny’s Child to solo superstardom to entrepreneur—each chapter designed less around being everywhere and more around owning what matters most.

Her pivot: working smarter, not harder

Beyoncé has been candid that the early years of her career were defined by saying yes to almost everything: nonstop tours, red carpets, awards shows, and press that eventually led to insomnia, exhaustion, and deteriorating mental health. She has since told GQ in an interview that she draws a hard line: if a project doesn’t obsess her when she wakes up and follow her into her dreams at night, she passes—even if it is lucrative.

That philosophy extends to her calendar. She structures touring around her children’s school breaks and disappears from public events between major projects so she can recover, create, and be present at home. The result is fewer appearances, but each is bigger, more meticulously produced, and more profitable—culminating in tours grossing hundreds of millions and films that extend the earning life of each era.

What leaders can learn about burnout

Beyoncé’s shift mirrors a broader reckoning. In 2024, roughly 82% of knowledge workers surveyed across North America, Asia, and Europe reported at least some level of burnout, even as 88% also described themselves as highly engaged. That “burned out but locked in” paradox—employees simultaneously exhausted and deeply invested—creates a dangerous incentive to push hardest on the people already at their limit.

For HR leaders, the warning is clear: relying on a small cadre of “work horses” risks a toxic cycle where top performers quietly hit a wall and leave as soon as the job market improves. Beyoncé’s own playbook offers a lesson for business leaders: define the culture you actually want, clarify strategy, and invest in what you’re already good at instead of layering on more work for the same people.

The year of “no”

If the early Beyoncé era was about never saying no, today’s workforce is moving the other way. Roughly 65% of employees now feel empowered to decline additional responsibilities, with workers 25 and under the most likely to say no to extra tasks. That resistance is not laziness; survey respondents describe it as a survival strategy against chronic burnout, even as many still feel guilt when they set boundaries.

The most effective employers, research suggests, are those that normalize these boundaries by redesigning roles and workloads rather than glorifying the martyr who always says yes. Beyoncé’s refusal to trade her time for every opportunity—even when demand is virtually unlimited—is a high-profile version of the same move.

A billionaire blueprint for sustainable ambition

Taken together, Beyoncé’s trajectory and recent workplace data point to a new blueprint for high achievement:

Own the leverage, not the hours. Beyoncé’s billionaire status flows from asset ownership—catalog, company, creative IP—rather than simply stacking more tour dates or endorsements. Workers and executives alike gain the most when they move away from performative busyness toward roles and projects where their unique skills compound over time.

Make boundaries a performance strategy. Her choice to tour around her family’s schedule and to vanish between eras is not a luxury; it is why each launch lands as an event, not just another release. Fortune’s reporting shows that companies that build similar space—by empowering employees to say no, rebalancing workloads, and focusing on results rather than constant availability—are better positioned to retain engaged, high-performing talent in a tight labor market.

Redefine what “hard work” looks like. Beyoncé has said she has already “worked harder than anyone” she knows—now the challenge is to work smarter. For ambitious professionals, that means trading the visible grind of late nights and endless emails for the less visible work of prioritization, creative focus, and long-term bets that, like hers, can eventually be measured not in hours logged, but in enduring value created.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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Business

Gen Z may not be able to afford a house or the cost of living now—but give it 10 years

Published

1 hour ago

December 30, 2025

Jace Porter

Gen Z is living the paycheck-to-paycheck twenties lifestyle—splurging on high rent costs and dishing out 99-cent ramen noodles. Yet in just a decade, they’ll be the most powerful economic force.

Only two years ago, Gen Z had amassed $9 trillion in income, but by 2030 they’re expected to have $36 trillion. And by 2040, that number rises to $74 trillion. A 2025 Bank of America report showed this will place them as the richest—and largest—generation by 2035, as Gen Z is expected to grow to 30% of the global population in the next decade.

Gen Z’s projected economic dominance can feel worlds away from their current economic situation. But there might be light at the end of the tunnel as they climb up the corporate ladder and take on their family’s inheritance.

Gen Z’s current economic woes: no houses and no kids

Many young people are strapped for cash, stepping out of college and into an uncertain job market. Gen Zers are having to turn down job opportunities because they can’t afford commuting expenses. They’re spoiling their pets in lieu of having children, which have become too expensive to raise, and abandoning the pipe dream of purchasing a home—unless they receive an inheritance.

Gen Z is also struggling with holding down a job. Young households receiving unemployment surged 32% year over year in February, according to the report. But it’s not for a lack of trying, despite the naysayers. The report said Gen Zers are “overeducated and underemployed,” and amid a tough white-collar labor market, unemployment for new entrants was up over 9% year over year in February. This results in Gen Z taking gigs that they may be overqualified or not the right fit for, which can have long-term career ramifications.

Yet in just 10 years, this could all flip on its head. The Bank of America report noted that wage growth for Gen Z increased by 8% year over year in February. A part of this bump can be attributed to the generation finally entering the full-time job market, leading to higher wages. But the biggest contributing factor in their financial boost is the Great Wealth Transfer, expected to hit Gen Z bank accounts in the years to come.

The great wealth transfer into the pockets of Gen Z

With the odds stacked against them, Gen Z’s best bet on living comfortably is coming into wealth.

About $84 trillion is anticipated to pass down from seniors and baby boomers to Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z by 2045, according to a 2021 report from Cerulli Associates. Most of the money will be handed over to Gen X and millennials—but 38% of Gen Z still anticipate they will receive an inheritance, according to a separate survey.

Gen Z’s share of the pie, alongside their stark wage increases, will lead to a ballooning of their economic power. Even in the current day, the young generation is a force to be reckoned with. They have higher discretionary spending habits compared to others, and their global spending is expected to reach $12.6 trillion by 2030, compared to $2.7 trillion in 2024. Their spending growth per household has also been stronger than the overall population, including both necessity and discretionary spending, according to the report.

There’s a few reasons why Gen Z spends so much of their money: They’re pouring funds into their high rents and education costs; “doom spending” on essentials and small luxuries, instead of saving up for bigger investments that feel unattainable; and trying to escape their high credit card and student loan debt.

But businesses should take note: Once Gen Zers have money to burn, they’ll be in the driver’s seat of the economy. Companies are already taking note of their preferences: luxury, e-commerce, wellness and beauty, and pets. Gen Z is also deeply invested in fintech, new media, gaming, and big tech, according to the Bank of America report. Their tastes will shape which business will thrive in 2035.

“It’s likely they will be among the most disruptive generations to economies, markets, and social systems,” the Bank of America report says. “Whether it’s due to changing diets or reduced alcohol consumption or saving and housing, Gen Z will redefine what it means to be a U.S. consumer.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on March 17, 2025.

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