Pete Davidson Influencer Rant Calls Out TikTok Paydays

Pete Davidson has a habit of saying the quiet part out loud, and his latest interview is no exception. Sitting down with Variety for an "Ask a Local" segment, the Saturday Night Live alum turned a casual chat into an extended complaint about the economics of the feed. His main target was the "get ready with me" genre: creators who narrate their makeup routines into a phone camera. Davidson claimed some of them take home $40 million a year, and paired the figure with a blunt verdict. "The world's broken," he said. The Pete Davidson Influencer Rant took off from there, and according to OK Magazine, which reported on the interview, it only got louder.

Davidson started with the morning-routine videos. He described scrolling past young women talking to themselves on camera and wondered aloud what the job actually is. "Who are you? What do you do?" he asked, in the comedian's telling, before landing on the answer: not a job, in his book. The Pete Davidson Influencer Rant reads less like a press-tour soundbite and more like something he has been holding in for years, the kind of grievance that usually stays in the green room.

Why the TikTok dancers got it too

From there he moved on to the dancers. Davidson said watching people his own age mutter something into their phones and then launch into choreographed routines makes him feel old, and he did not mean it as a compliment. He called the videos insane and lame in the same breath, and asked whether nobody else could see how strange the whole ritual looks from the outside. For a guy who came up through stand-up, where the audience is in the room, the phone-first performance style clearly registers as alien, and that discomfort fuels the Pete Davidson Influencer Rant.

The money is the engine of the whole rant. Davidson did not really argue that the creators are bad at what they do; he questioned the scale of the reward. Eight-figure paydays for filming your face while comics spend a decade grinding clubs is, in his telling, the punchline that writes itself. He knows the critique cuts both ways, since his own tabloid fame did not come solely from punchlines, and that tension is what gives the Pete Davidson Influencer Rant its charge.

The OnlyFans punchline

The rant ended as a joke about his own career. Davidson said he thinks about launching an OnlyFans account about once a week, riffing on the idea of posting soft-core photos in tight underwear and retiring on the proceeds. He framed it as a backup plan: if the comedy thing stops working, the feed is still there. "I do think about it once a week," he admitted, according to OK Magazine's account of the interview.

It is the most 2026 joke a comic can make. The line works because Davidson is openly admitting he is tempted by the same machine he is roasting. That is the part that separated this from a standard old-man-yells-at-clouds bit. He is not pretending to be above the influencer economy. He is saying the money is so big that even he, a guy with a real Hollywood career, does the math sometimes.

He also talked about Ariana Grande

The interview was not all venom. Davidson spoke warmly about his ex-fiancee Ariana Grande, praising her talent and defending her against the online body-shaming she has faced. He said the two are not in regular contact but remain on good terms, and described her as a strong person who knows how to handle the attention. It was a softer gear from the same conversation, and it showed the part of Davidson that still gets protective about people he once cared about.

Why the clip keeps circulating

The Pete Davidson Influencer Rant keeps moving because Davidson sits exactly on the seam between two fame systems. There is the pipeline he came through, where you earn a spot on a stage, and the algorithmic one, where the spot earns you. When he asks what a "get ready with me" creator actually does, he is voicing a friction that plenty of viewers feel while scrolling, even if they keep watching anyway.

Whether the rant was a bit or a genuine complaint barely matters now. The comments split exactly the way these things usually do: half the audience laughing along, half pointing out that Davidson has cashed plenty of checks for being famous. But the clip names something concrete, the distance between the money and the work as most people understand work. And the OnlyFans gag lands for the same reason. Plenty of commenters have done the math on what they would post for eight figures.

Source: OK Magazine reported on Davidson's Variety "Ask a Local" interview.