From 'Top G' To 'In Jail': Who Is Andrew Tate? The Rise And Fall Of The Manosphere Influencer

The internet manosphere circle is largely split between pick-up artists and rise and grinders, with a personality like Andrew Tate seemingly striking the jackpot by speaking to both topics. Tate saw the rise of his own hugely viral personal brand in 2022, eating and rebuffing almost every accusation of misogyny on his way to internet fame.

But by mid-2023, Tate had not only been banned from most major social media platforms, he has also been arrested and charged with various crimes against women. Recently, the controversial influencer was also interviewed by Tucker Carlson in a video that's now accumulated nearly 100 million views in a week — with some even claiming it's now the most watched interview of all time.

Here's a rundown of how things shook down for one of the most decisive public personalities in recent years.

Who Is Andrew Tate and Why Is He Famous?

For a significant amount of people that know Andrew Tate today, their first encounter with Tate's work was his motivational videos. In these, Tate provided advice to his primarily male audience on his YouTube channel TateSpeech, and clips of his monologues would commonly get reposted to Instagram, TikTok and the like.

Tate's outlook on life as seen in these videos was very male-centric — discussing inflammatory topics like "how women need men" and "how men are objectively intellectually superior to women."

But Tate's viral content, which many felt was extremely sexist, wasn't his first brush with fame. In the early 2010s, he used to be a professional kickboxer and even had a brief stint on a reality television show. Tate also briefly dated Mikayla Peterson, Jordan Peterson's daughter.

But as his kickboxing career dwindled and his brief reality show career fizzled out, Tate and his brother devised a different scheme to make millions — a webcam service that routinely exploited women.

Why Was Andrew Tate Arrested, And What Was He Charged With?

Andrew and Tristan Tate set up a webcam service in the 2010s that proved to be a huge financial success for the brother duo. Webcaming is a service where women intimately interact with (oftentimes) men over a video call and charge a fee for their service.

Over the course of his career, Tate has routinely bragged about the various ways he entraps women and pulls them into his webcamming scheme, going so far as to say that he moved to the Eastern European country of Romania in order to bypass laws that would ensure his female worker's safety.

Close to the turn of the new year in late 2022, Tate was arrested by Romanian police under suspicion of human trafficking and violence against women, and charged with said crimes in June 2023.

What Were Some Popular Memes Featuring Andrew Tate?

Andrew Tate's rise to fame as a contentious male motivational speaker wasn't without criticism or pushback from both audiences and social media platforms. In August 2022, at the peak of Tate's fame, he found himself banned from Meta platforms, YouTube and TikTok. The rapid onset of the blanket ban against Tate led to people joking about what else Tate has been banned from.

After Tate's arrest, a humorous photo of a shocked-looking Andrew Tate began to circulate in 2023. The photo stems from a Bloomberg article that was published during Tate's social media ban and even inspired an equally unflattering Wojak drawing.

Another popular meme associated with Tate is the catchphrase "Common Tate W," which is used by fans of Tate's work to commend his ideas. At the height of Tate's fame, clips of Tate speaking would be reposted to sites like TikTok by fans alongside the phrase "Common Tate W" in which "W" stands for "Win."

What Are Some Other Notable Memes Featuring Andrew Tate?

Another meme featuring Andrew Tate is the prevalent Bottom G parodies in which one gay German man named Brian Michael Hinds makes the most of his own uncanny likeness to Tate by making flamboyant dancing videos.

The trend of feminizing Tate in order to mock his misogynistic ideas is a prominent refrain in meme culture, also seen in the Coquette Andrew Tate meme trend in which girls edit photos of Tate working out to make it appear as though he is undergoing ballerina training in a Hello Kitty-themed world.

Tucker Carlson Interview

In mid-July 2023, Andrew Tate appeared on the ninth episode of Tucker Carlson's new talk show Tucker on Twitter in which he urged his viewers to make up their own minds about the controversial figure. The two-and-a-half-hour interview has since stirred up considerable backlash from his detractors as it accumulated over 93 million views in seven days.

With nearly 100 million views, the divisive interview is being claimed by both Tate-related fan pages and even notable figures like Elon Musk himself as the "most watched interview of all time," purportedly surpassing Oprah Winfrey's interview with Michael Jackson. Others have pointed out, however, that this is somewhat misleading since the comparison was made to Wikipedia's list of the "most watched television interviews."

Ep. 9 The Andrew Tate interview pic.twitter.com/0KKMzSVmMO

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 11, 2023

For more information on Andrew Tate, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.