‘Unfollow Vexbolts’: How Self-Sabotage Became the Creator Economy’s First Genius Tactic of 2025

Those who spend a lot of time on TikTok might have noticed a phrase popping up across the app in the last week of 2024: “Vexbolts mass unfollowing Dec 31st, spread the word.”

The sentence isn’t coded garble only comprehensible to Gen Alphas like “Ohio Skibidi Rizz.” A TikTok creator named Vexbolts, the often-credited originator of the popular “let him cook” meme, faced a mass exodus of followers on New Year’s Eve for no cancel-worthy offense or other discernible reason.

But while this scenario is considered a nightmare for creators, Vexbolts used the attention to his advantage and pulled off the first successful creator economy stunt of 2025.

It’s still unclear when or why the “Vexbolts mass unfollowing” movement happened — some have even speculated it was Vexbolts himself behind it from the beginning. But the first instance of the phrase seems to be from a video posted by TikTok user unemployedcrashout on Christmas Eve.

Vexbolts has been criticized for chasing online trends and flaunting his status as the “let him cook” guy (or, as the chronically online may put it, for being “cringe”), so there may have likely been genuine animosity behind the movement’s early adopters.

Regardless, the biggest promoter of the unfollow Vexbolts movement was Vexbolts himself: Starting on Dec. 22, he posted numerous videos on the subject, each with millions of views, speculating on his downfall, pleading for other creators to help him or even thanking the sudden influx of fans for the new follows.

He eventually managed to get the attention of other major creators, including the biggest fish of them all, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson. Ever the online marketing expert, MrBeast appeared in three videos with Vexbolts to promote his Lunchly meal kits, which earned some 151 million total views.

Within days, calls to “unfollow Vexbolts” hit full-blown meme status. The phrase permeated across TikTok via comments on unrelated videos, which led to people making videos asking who Vexbolts even was. The official TikTok accounts for several major sports teams even told their followers to leave Vexbolts behind in 2024.

Thanks to aggressive self-promotion, curiosity from bystanders, and co-signs from bigger creators, Vexbolts’ follower count on TikTok skyrocketed from 1.6 million on Dec. 24 to over 8 million within a week. The “funeral” stream he held 15 minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve drew in almost 1 million viewers, setting a record for the most-watched livestream on TikTok.

When the time came for the great unfollowing, Vexbolts’ follower count indeed plummeted in just 48 hours, to under 3 million. Yet the story was far from over: The first video posted after Vexbolts’ “death” has gotten over 300 million views, and since then he had been promoting a “Re-follow Vexbolts" event, which happened last night and garnered several million more views.

Within days, Vexbolts’ TikTok account has bounced back to 4.9 million followers — well over double the trackers he had before the “unfollow” movement began.

The unfollowing stunt is a prime example of the highly effective, organic, meme-powered type of online marketing that even the biggest firms have yet to create on command. It speaks to how, with online communities more insulated than ever, generating follower engagement is just as, if not more, crucial for a creator’s growth than the number of followers they actually have.

But the stunt also exposes a key challenge for creators: transferring the momentum they have from one online platform to another. Looking at Vexbolts’ social media accounts shows the unfollow trend wasn’t nearly as dramatic elsewhere as it was on TikTok.

His Instagram account saw a smaller version of the mass exodus, dropping from 270,000 to under 200,000 followers on New Year’s Day before bouncing back again, but his smaller followings on Twitch and YouTube didn’t see any meaningful drops.

That said, while Vexbolts’ smaller accounts didn’t grow or drop wildly, they still saw steady gains. The creator’s YouTube channel grew from 15,000 subscribers to nearly 37,000 from Christmas Eve to Jan. 6, while his Twitch channel gained 10,000 followers in the same period.

All of these increases are certainly respectable — but they’re far from the millions gained on TikTok. Diversifying one’s online base has always been a challenge for creators, but with TikTok’s U.S. ban on the horizon and the larger fracturing of social media from a few big platforms to dozens of niche communities, the problem will only become harder to solve.

Vexbolts may not have cracked the code for massive, multiplatform online growth, but he at least hit on some key ingredients: an unusual premise, an easy call to action, persistent promotion and, in this case, a hint of schadenfreude.