Last December, Adin Ross traveled to Dubai to meet his new mentor, Andrew Tate. The 22-year-old streamer already had an audience rivaling the 36-year-old alpha male lifestyle guru — 7.2 million Twitch subscribers, plus 3.5 million on YouTube — but Tate offered something more than clout: advice. A month before, the pair had streamed a conversation about Ross’ recent breakup, and now Tate was holding forth about how Ross could pursue a more fulfilling life.
“Where’s your wife? You need to get a good, wholesome woman,” Tate lectured.
“Well it’s kind of fucking hard,” Ross protested. “We’re in 2022; it’s really hard to get a nice, pleasant lady, bro.”
“Find them,” Tate replied.
“How?” Ross asked.
The nearly two-hour live dialogue that followed, which has more than 3 million views on YouTube, was the culmination of their months-long online relationship. Just a few weeks later, Tate and his brother Tristan were arrested and detained in Romania on suspicion of rape and human trafficking. (The siblings maintain their innocence and are currently under house arrest as the criminal investigation continues.)
The arrests marked a turning point for Ross. After he’d hosted Tate on his stream last July, they’d quickly developed a distinctive rapport: Tate acting as a tough-minded older brother, belittling Ross for various shortcomings and weaknesses, ostensibly so Ross would realize he had to change his habits and outlook. Their first conversation now has 7 million views on YouTube.
Ross’ eagerness to remake himself under Tate’s guidance coincided with an escalating career drama that, by the end of February, saw him permanently banned from Twitch — and moving over to Kick, an upstart streaming service where he has been free to indulge his most dangerous impulses. (Kick is currently the third most-downloaded app in the App Store’s “Photo & Video” category, ahead of YouTube and Snapchat, having rapidly amassed more than a million users.) Ross’s social channels, once devoted to video games and juvenile hijinks, were gradually subsumed by radicalizing narratives about gender grievance, censorship, and “cancel culture,” as well as provocations that surpassed his typical frat-dude insensitivities. On Kick, Ross has streamed to his viewers — many of them minors — videos from a porn site. Though he is Jewish, he’s also given airtime to an anonymous neo-Nazi and platformed a high-profile white supremacist banned from mainstream social media.
A massive audience of impressionable young men who aspire to be like Ross have consumed it all. Once an apolitical entity, he has begun to introduce these viewers to far-right perspectives and, in some instances, served as a valuable mouthpiece for Tate, who was his gateway into that side of the internet. “He put stuff into my head,” Ross said during a podcast interview in January. “He made me believe, like, you need to become the best version of yourself.”
BEFORE CONNECTING WITH TATE, Ross was like any twentysomething social media star. Born in Florida, he started making content as a teen — and has claimed he even skipped his high school prom to stream on Twitch. He launched his channel there in 2019, playing the basketball video game series NBA 2K, through which he befriended Bronny James, the son of LeBron James. He became a fixture in the “W/L” (gamer speak for “wins” and “losses”) community, a popular group of streamers that includes Kai Cenat. After a stint in a Los Angeles content creator house, he settled into a Hollywood Hills mansion previously leased by TikTok celebrity Charli D’Amelio.
Streaming has made Ross a millionaire. Nonetheless, he was drawn to an older man who seemed to hold the secret of even greater success. “Tate has clearly cultivated an aesthetic and personality specifically tailored to appeal to a certain subsect of young men — an almost cartoonish representation of the ultimate ‘cool guy’ persona,” says Blyth Crawford, a research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation who studies gender-based hate.
Tate appeared to play to Ross’ insecurities to establish himself as the younger man’s tutor: during a November conversation, Tate berated him for a breakup with his girlfriend. “If she’ll fuck a man like you, she’ll fuck basically anybody,” Tate told his student. “If you think that you’re so fucking special, Adin, that through all these months, she couldn’t find some other guy in terrible shape who drinks soy lattes, with enough money to afford a shitty apartment in fucking L.A., then you are out of your mind.”
“The truth is beautiful,” Tate ranted as Ross listened attentively. “You must accept and embrace it, you must look in the mirror and accept that I am right. And you need to become a formidable force of man that cannot be replaced or replicated anywhere else on god’s green Earth. That’s what you must do. You are failing yourself and God. That’s why she left you, Adin!”
While Ross did not respond to requests for interview or comment, his influencer sister, Naomi Ross, 27, tells Rolling Stone that Adin doesn’t necessarily buy into the misogyny Tate preaches. “However,” she says, “when you are talking to somebody who’s very confident and gives you really good advice about, you know, being the best version of yourself, that energy is very intoxicating. So I think that’s what made the relationship grow.” She maintains that her brother is not sexist. “No, no, he’s not,” she says. “He’s very, very, very, very respectful towards women. Very, very close with me, very, very close with my mom. He’s very protective over us. And whenever he’s in a relationship, he’s all in; it’s all or nothing for him.”
Ross and Tate continued to collaborate on streams through 2022, even as the latter was booted off Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok in August. Tate preemptively deleted his Twitch channel, presumably to avoid being banned there as well, which would have prevented him from appearing as a guest on other streams. Their Dubai summit took place the next month, at Tate’s invitation. At that meeting, Ross sniffed Tate’s chair when he got up and left the room, and the clip continues to circulate as evidence of his peculiar devotion.
Then, at the end of December, Tate and his brother were arrested in Bucharest. The news distressed Ross, and he has shown unwavering support for Tate throughout his legal travails, even after Romanian authorities laid out rape and sex trafficking charges. Ross tweeted that President Biden should intervene in the case and shaved his head in homage to his guru. He also joined in vague speculation that Tate may have been framed.
“If that news is true — if a girl really framed him — the girl deserves to go to Romanian prison for life,” Ross said on his Twitch channel in February. “Send that bitch to fucking jail!” he yelled, pounding his desk. Tate has tweeted that Ross is one of five people he has approved to visit him in detention, the other four being family members.
ROSS HAD BEEN AN OFFICIAL Twitch Partner, meaning he enjoyed extra features and monetization benefits on the Amazon-owned site, and the company expected him to be a “role model” for the site. Previously, he took temporary bans in stride. In 2021, when the site suspended him for a week over a stream in which he could be seen texting while driving, he said they “did the right thing.”
He was less apologetic after receiving his seventh ban, also a week long, in January. The specific violation remains unknown, and Ross posted a YouTube video on Feb. 11 claiming Twitch had tried to “silence” him after he’d had his account reinstated. Although he did not divulge the nature of Twitch’s concerns, he claimed that a representative from the company told him, “If you keep doing controversial stuff, and you keep saying certain things, and you keep basically promoting certain things on your stream, we’re going to have to take you down indefinitely.” (A Twitch representative tells Rolling Stone that, as a policy, the company does not comment on individual streamer channels.)
While Ross occasionally streamed himself playing games like Grand Theft Auto V alongside casual hangouts with friends, Tate’s imprisonment appeared to accelerate his makeover as something of a self-help figure. He took to speaking about personal improvement, or becoming “the best version of yourself,” through rigorous workouts (push-ups being the most cited form of exercise) and abstaining from masturbation (Ross has said he is attempting to remain “celibate“). Both ideas mirror Tate’s notions of personal discipline — although Tate claims the reason he doesn’t watch porn and hasn’t masturbated in “years” is because he has “too many women to fuck.”
Ross’ peers on Twitch were alarmed to see him taking cues from Tate. One fellow streamer, Félix Lengyel (better known as xQc), warned him about going down this path. “I think he’s trying really hard to emulate the things that are happening to Tate, and what Tate is doing,” Lengyel said on a stream. “I think it’s a really unhealthy rabbit hole to go down. I don’t think he truly wants it, but I don’t think he gets it.” A prominent left-wing streamer, Hasan Piker, aired a phone call after Tate’s December arrest in which he advised Ross not to mimic him. “You need better positive male role models in your life, Adin,” he said.
“You better not fucking shave your head. Bro, are you in a cult, what is this? Like, he’s making you shave your head?” Piker then asked. Ross answered that the choice was “about disciplining myself.”
“It’s a privilege to have hair, bro,” Ross explained. “But I’m not the best version of myself, so I don’t deserve to have privileges.”
And there were other worrying signs of where Ross was headed. Earlier in December, he’d revealed plans to speak with Kanye West, following the rapper’s pro-Hitler tirade on Alex Jones’ InfoWars. In the midst of a backlash to this idea, he revealed himself to be unfamiliar with the concept of fascism. (The interview with West never happened.) Ross also launched a crusade against the category of hot tub streams, which typically feature women in bikinis interacting with viewers for hours while soaking in spas. In January, he called for Twitch to ban such content, referring to it as “poison” and “soft porn,” evidently as part of his turn against sexual imagery.
AS ROSS EMBARKED on his Tate-inspired transformation, he was enticed by a new streaming platform, Kick, which had launched in October. He saw it as a liberating alternative with more lenient moderation than Twitch. Moreover, it allows gambling content — something Ross had profitably streamed on Twitch until it was banned there in September. A Kick representative says that while the company is its own entity, it has major investment from Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, the co-founders of Stake, a crypto casino and sports betting site. Tyler “Trainwreck” Niknam, a notable gambling streamer and one of Ross’ friends, is consulting for the site. Before Twitch prohibited the practice, Stake also sponsored Ross’ gambling streams there.
“We can do whatever the fuck we want,” Ross told his Twitch fans in an announcement about joining the rival site. “There’s no terms of service over there. You guys can say whatever you want in my chat.”
Actually, the platform has plenty of rules prohibiting harassment, hate speech, copyright violations and the like. However, none were obeyed or enforced as Ross streamed Super Bowl LVII live on Feb. 12 to as many as 100,000 people, immediately shattering Kick’s viewership records. The chat section throughout the event was brimming with violent, racist, and homophobic comments, as well as plenty of swastikas, all of which appeared next to the NFL’s broadcast and advertiser spots. One screenshot showed a viewer repeatedly commenting “JEWS CAUSED 911 NEVER FORGET.” This act of piracy, for which the NFL could theoretically seek millions in damages, and the toxic din that accompanied it, were just the beginning of Ross’ unfortunate stunts on the streaming platform. (Neither the NFL nor Kick answered questions regarding the incident.)
Following the chaotic Super Bowl stream, Ross continued to test the limits of his freedom. In one Kick stream, he showed sexually explicit videos from Pornhub to tens of thousands of viewers, many of whom were presumably underage despite navigating past an 18+ age verification pop-up. “Wait, how old you guys in the chat, bro?” he asked after closing the window. He saw that many were under 18. “Jesus, okay. I didn’t know that,” he said before changing the subject. The next day, he apologized, saying he was taking “full accountability” for what he’d done.
At the end of February, Twitch suspended Ross’ account again, and he said the ban was permanent. Reportedly, the last straw was his decision to display comments from his Kick chat on his Twitch channel for about 20 minutes, exposing viewers there to a deluge of abusive and offensive speech. Twitch confirmed that Ross had broken their rule against “unmoderated Hateful Conduct in chat, such as racist and anti-semitic messages.” Speaking about the ban on Kick, Ross insinuated that identity politics were a factor in his punishment. “If I had blue hair and did my makeup and fingernails, would you have permanently banned me, bro?” he said. “No, they wouldn’t have.” He added that he had been banned “for no reason.”
Rod Breslau, the co-founding editor of ESPN Esports and a consultant to major companies on the gaming and streaming scene, tells Rolling Stone that Ross has “no one to blame but himself” for the problems he had at Twitch. “At the same time,” he notes, the platform is known to be “inconsistent with how it bans people,” changing penalties arbitrarily depending on the individual and the infraction. “Twitch has done no favors for itself here, though I’d be hard pressed to say Adin’s suspensions were not warranted,” he says.
THE DEPARTURE FROM TWITCH only seemed to embolden Ross, who began harping on the phrase “there are only two genders,” a common transphobic dog-whistle. He took to interviewing right-wing extremists — at times trying to debate them, or acting shocked by their views, but largely failing to push back on their messaging. On a stream where he addressed the Twitch ban, Ross suggested to Niknam that Kick should bring aboard white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who is banned from most mainstream social platforms for hate speech. He also wanted to invite Paul Miller, a.k.a. GypsyCrusader, a notorious neo-Nazi who advocates for race war and was convicted on multiple firearms offenses in 2021, to join the site. During that conversation, Ross also played a clip in which Miller uses the n-word while dressed as Hitler.
Two days later, he streamed a call with an anonymous man wearing a mask with a swastika and hateful slurs written on it, with a “Black Sun” Nazi flag hung on the wall behind him. “I’m not trying to give you a platform, I just want to know why are you like this,” Ross said. “Why not?” the interviewee replied. “The Jews want to get rid of white people. Why not fight back?” Ross told the unidentified man that he was “wrong” for expressing such hate but only ended the call after the man started reciting racist and homophobic slurs.
Ross started inviting Fuentes onto his Kick channel once the Twitch ban was handed down. In one interview, Ross queried him about a rumored “Day of Hate” during which extremists would potentially target Jewish communities or individuals for harassment and violence. Fuentes claimed he had no involvement with it, and Ross accepted his answer.
In March, Ross called Fuentes again to address how Jews are disproportionately affected by hate crimes. Fuentes falsely countered that most such crimes are “hoaxes” and argued that Kanye West had tweeted an image of a swastika melded with the Star of David to promote “mutual understanding, harmony, bringing people together.” (That post led Elon Musk to ban West from Twitter once again.) When Fuentes said that “Jews are doing the work of Satan,” Ross laughingly protested but then asked, “Can you please elaborate?”
If Ross sees little issue in consorting with Fuentes or letting his chat be overrun with anti-semitic memes, his sister Naomi feels otherwise. She tells Rolling Stone that she has warned Ross to be mindful of his own safety, as there are “crazy people out there.” As for the ones spamming Ross’ channel with swastikas, she says, “Yeah, that’s scared me, and I don’t like that at all.”
Niknam and other Kick supporters often say they prefer the platform because it has generous revenue splits for creators. But Ross and other streamers with large followings are clearly also interested in pushing edgier content you won’t find on Twitch. Instances of porn, nudity, and hate speech abounded on other channels. Michael Peters, a.k.a. Heelmike, who has 7.4 million Twitch followers, earned only a one-day ban from Kick for streaming himself receiving oral sex, which indicates a high threshold for misbehavior on the site.
And Kick hasn’t indicated any action against Ross for platforming reactionary zealots — to viewers who are, overwhelmingly, impressionable teen boys and young men messing around in a chat space teeming with violent, dehumanizing language. Ross has not always been above such rhetoric himself: “To all you guys that get to pick your pronouns, my pronouns is kill/them,” he said on a stream this week. “Y’all are making the world a shitty place, bro.”
In a statement to Rolling Stone, a Kick representative says that “Kick is currently in Beta and our moderation scales each day with a focus on intent,” and that “Adin makes the necessary adjustments every day through fruitful human-to-human discussions.”
THROUGHOUT HIS STREAMING, Ross’ Kick audience has taken advantage of the site’s evident disinterest in policing them. Many agreed with Fuentes’ antisemitic commentary, writing “W Nick” (for “Win Nick”) in the chat, and during another call Ross admonished his viewers to stop calling him “Oven Boy,” apparently a mocking Holocaust reference related to his Jewish heritage.
Meanwhile, he has continued to claim that Tate is innocent of any crimes. This sense of martyrdom creates “a strong sense of an in-group mentality of young men who view themselves as fighting for a moral good,” Crawford says. “This means that the narrativization of Tate’s arrest still remains a strong recruitment factor.”
And each day, more ordinary teens join the community, with Kick capitalizing off instability at Twitch and luring users who feel “mistreated and neglected” by the streaming giant, Breslau says. Newcomers will naturally be drawn to the stars of the site, and Ross is currently the biggest. He’s always known how to capture attention — the trouble is that some in his orbit can leverage that fame to their own benefit. “My whole entire life, ever since my brother was very young, wherever he went, people were very attracted to him because he’s sincere,” Naomi says. “It’s true. He is a sincere person.”