His videos have been condemned for extreme misogyny, but gained a huge following. So who exactly is the man who was, earlier this year, the most googled person on the planet?
The King of Toxic Masculinity welcomes me into his compound in a suburb on the outskirts of Bucharest and offers me a cigar. His name is Andrew Tate and he was once on Big Brother. For a while – although not because of that – he may have been the most famous man in the world.
We'll get to that. For now, just be aware that there's an axe, a sword and a couple of knives on the coffee table and a bunch of supercars in the yard. I recognise a Rolls-Royce, but otherwise cars aren't really my thing. Deeper inside, in his wood-panelled cigar room, there's a safe the size of a fridge full of cash, watches and gold, and a huge CCTV screen on the wall, on which he points out the armed guards dotted around the property. They're allowed to carry weapons, he explains, because his home is registered with the Romanian authorities as a shooting range. That's one reason he doesn't live in the UK – so his bodyguards can have guns.
Now look. I know what you are thinking. How can this be the most famous man in the world if you've never heard of him? It's a fair question, and 10 days earlier I'd hardly heard of him either. The thing is, lots of other people had. "I am the most googled man on the planet," he said in January. "I am more googled than Joe Biden, Donald Trump. Look it up."
He says it to me too, several times. Granted, there is much Tate says that should be taken with a pinch of salt – he has also claimed to be the world's first trillionaire – but he may have been right. Last month, though, he was banned from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Not long before that, Hope Not Hate, the activist group, had declared, "Our major concern is that his brand of extreme and sometimes violent misogyny is reaching a young male audience and that he could serve as a gateway to wider far-right politics."
Was this fair or was it not? That's what I've come to Romania to find out.
"I'm telling you," Tate says. "I never thought I'd become the most famous man in the world by saying women make me coffee."
Let's be honest. It's not just about coffee. There are scores of Andrew Tate clips still floating around, even on the platforms from which he has been banned. "Bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up, bitch," he says in one. In another, he says, "Slap, slap, grab, choke, shut up bitch, sex."
"That was about me sleeping with a machete next to my bed," he says now. "I'm a security-conscious individual." And what happened, he says, was that a girl picked up the machete and told him she'd chop his head off if he cheated, so he told her what he'd do to stop her. "And she laughed out loud," he says. " 'You're so funny! Give me a kiss.' So that was a joke."
The problem, says Tate, is that these things all turn up as tiny clips from longer videos and are never considered in context. Our coffee discussion, for example, is sparked by me reading him another widely reported quote – in which he says a woman should "have kids, sit at home, be quiet and make coffee" – which he insists he simply never said. Although, for the record, he has also definitely said that he'll ask a woman to bring him two coffees and then drink only one because "it's doing something that is basically pointless to show that you have respect for me". Which I have not tried at home.
There's also another video. We should mention that. It's the one that got him kicked out of Big Brother in 2016 after it appeared in the Daily Star. In it, he slaps a blonde girl in the face – you hear it; it's definitely a slap – and then beats her with a belt.
I watch it before I meet him. Then, after I get back to my hotel, after two hours in which we have frankly got on pretty well, I make myself watch it again. Tate says now that it was a consensual sex game, and it's true that the woman involved has released a video in which she says the same. He also points out, quite vehemently, that the lefty liberals who hate him so much also usually say it's wrong to "kink shame" people for their sexual preferences. I must be the wrong sort of lefty liberal, though, because I think it's f***ing gross.
Tate's father was Emory Tate, a trailblazing black chess grandmaster. Tate Sr had a playing style that focused on attacking, never defending, which is a detail worth remembering. His mother, Eileen, was largely a housewife. Tate Jr started life in Chicago, Illinois, before moving as a child to a council estate in Luton. Or, as he puts it, "The worst town in the UK." His voice is a mess. Think Loyd Grossman, but furious.
"They were together," he says of his parents, "but my father was in the air force. He was away for long periods of time. And he was away at chess tournaments for long periods of time. And he'd come home and say, 'Look, your mother has to do the day-to-day stuff. I'm a man. I have to make sure you're protected.' And we'd sit and we'd play chess."
Tate describes himself as a "chess prodigy" but he also says he wasn't quite good enough. Instead, he got into kickboxing. Four times he was the International Sport Karate Association's world champion. After that, though, he went into porn.
Not as a performer. Instead, he and his brother, Tristan, set up an agency through which they managed webcam performers: women who performed sex acts on camera. Each girl, he says now, would usually keep 80 to 85 per cent of the money; money paid by online punters who wanted them to do this or that. "Most of the girls that worked for me ended up being multimillionaires," he says now, although I ask him to give me a name, to put me in touch with just one of these happy, happy porn actresses who are now millionaires and he grows coy. "They're not interested in speaking to the press," he says. "They've moved on. They've dyed their hair. They're married."
He talks about it like an anodyne business venture. In the past, though, he's quipped on camera about the big hassle of how much sex it forced him to have. "I'd wake up," he said a few months ago, "and I'd be, like, seven of these bitches have done well. I have to f*** seven of these girls in the next three hours. I can't f*** one because the other six will get upset. I can't f*** none, because they all get upset and don't work. I've got to f*** all seven and I've got three hours. Damn."
Although the important point, he says now, is that none of them have ever accused him of wrongdoing. "It truly is amazing," he says, "that people have tried very hard to dig and find a woman with something bad to say about me. And they can't find a single one."
What I sense, though, is that none of this is quite explaining to you how Andrew Tate became the most famous man in the world.
I would say there are two answers to that question, and one of them is a bit technical. So let's deal with the other one first.
Good at being famous
Tate is famous because he's brilliant at what he does. I don't mean he's nice. He's definitely not nice. He's famous because he talks with an addictive, terrifying fluency perfectly suited to the internet age. Like Donald Trump – with whom there are all sorts of similarities, actually – he's compulsive when you agree with him, but equally compulsive when you do not. On his own videos, and on the podcasts of others, he tells his life story and offers his views on how men – and women – should behave.
Mostly he talks about success: how to become as rich as he is and as strong as he is, how to have sex with as many women as he apparently does. There's a temptation simply to ridicule this, but you cannot deny the extent to which it connects. There are, bluntly, a lot of young men out there who do not know what to be. What Tate does is answer that question. And you might not like his answer, but at least he has one.
The other reason Tate is so famous is that he set out to be. When we speak, at least at first, he insists that his banning is due to his critics clipping his videos out of context and that he's been hard done by.
This, though, is just not true. Both of those clips up above were circulated not by his critics but pretty clearly by his fans. What's more, they obviously thought they had his blessing. Until recently, you see, he was running a business called Hustlers University, which ostensibly offered online business advice but which also paid subscribers almost half the money generated from any new subscribers they went on to lure in.
Some called it a pyramid scheme – he said those allegations were "false" – but it also made his clips and content spread around the internet like a rash. "What you ideally want is a mix of 60-70 per cent fans and 30-40 per cent haters," he said in one Hustlers video. "You want arguments, you want war." Basically, he was a virus.
'I'm a traditional person'
"Can you give me an example of a specific misogynistic thing I said?" says Tate, leaning over the table in his cigar room.
I have some up my sleeve, but we don't get far. Tate, you see, does not believe himself to be a misogynist. Yes, he thinks that a man's job is to defend and provide for a woman and that a woman's job is to look after her man. Yes, he also thinks that a woman must be faithful and that a man – or at least a man like him; there's nuance here – need not be.
Also, he thinks women are most attractive about the age of 19 because at that stage – and this is a direct quote, although not to me – "they've been through less dick". But what he disputes, quite furiously, is that any of this is misogynistic. In fact, he says, I only think this because I'm an out of touch liberal.
"I'm not a misogynistic person," he says. "I'm a traditional person."
Hang on. I'm a married man who lives in a terraced house with two kids. He's a porn millionaire with numerous girlfriends who lives in a fortified Romanian compound. And he's the traditional one?
"Since the dawn of time," says Tate, "every king, every sultan, every emperor had more than one wife, or had a wife and a mistress. Powerful men have a certain status. Since the dawn of time. Not every man can say this. You interview a rapper and you won't question him in the same way."
His argument, you'll understand, is that it's not like this for all men. The guy working in Starbucks? No sleeping around for him. These rules are only for high-status men. Like Tate.
"If you are a high enough status male," he says, "and I'm talking from experience, women do not expect loyalty from you like they would from a lower-status male. This has been proved."
"Am I also a high-status male?" I ask.
Tate thinks not.
"Right," I say. "Why?"
"Because society has taken a turn for the worse," he says. "We live in a world where status is heavily derived from attention."
"But I have 200,000 Twitter followers," I say. "I have a radio show. Does that count?"
"Oh, OK," he says, sounding genuinely respectful. "Then perhaps you are."
Although then he points out that if I were to meet a 19-year-old Belarusian beauty queen in Dubai, she might not think so. Which I think is fair.
The thing is, I say carefully, I'm 45. So I'm not sure that having a 19-year-old Belarusian girlfriend would actually be high-status behaviour. In fact, I think it would be pretty low-status, shitty behaviour.
Tate shrugs.
"You're trying to apply your world view," he says. "And it is quite disrespectful. Not to me, but to the world. If you were in Dubai and you were a billionaire and you had a yacht, you would need the 19-year-old to be high status. It's a different game."
Later on he tells me that the difference between us is that he believes women are sovereign individuals who can make their own choices, and he just doesn't think I believe the same. So maybe I'm the misogynist here. Who knows?
Why Romania?
The Romania thing, though. That's weird. He's not from here. He barely speaks Romanian. And yet here he is in his converted warehouse that looks like a car showroom somewhere on the outskirts of Bucharest. Inasmuch as I can tell, we are nowhere special at all. The road outside is pitted. The flats across the road are just flats.
"It's a very misunderstood country," he tells me. "A lot of people have negative perceptions, which I think is quite xenophobic, quite racist."
This is probably true. It's also true, though, that he himself once joked that he was in Romania because "it's corrupt, which suits me because I'm f***ing rich".
He also, in a now deleted video on his YouTube channel, suggested that part of the reason had been the country's sex laws. "I'm not a f***ing rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want," was how he put it. What he meant by this, he says now, is that he sees Romania as immune to what he perceives as a western sickness of excessive legalism. "A dying empire adopts laws," he says. "Like a sick man adopts medicine."
Probably, though, I should point out that in April, this compound – right where I'm sitting – was raided by Romanian police as part of a human-trafficking investigation. Tate's version of this is that he was "swatted" – an internet term for your enemies lying so that armed police will be sent to your home. No charges have been brought.
It also seems to be a safety thing. "Bucharest is 20 to 30 times safer than London," he tells me. This is not true, although armed robbery is about three times more common in London, and that's presumably what he's worried about. While Tate does seem to have picked up that weird Trumpist American notion of the UK being a hellhole – "I wear a $1 million watch, I drive a $5 million car; you can't do any of that in London any more," he says – I suppose he would make for an attractive target for some Guy Ritchie film-style gang.
Even allowing for that, though, there is a streak of weird fearfulness here. The CCTV in his house, like I mentioned, is particularly insane. Even inside there are cameras everywhere except the toilets and bedrooms.
The money mystery
Although he's cagey about it, there is family in the picture too. His brother, Tristan, lives here (same idea, more hair) and he has a daughter. Other people – "girls, kids and baby mommas" as he puts it – come and go. Tate has children himself but won't talk about them.
"I am not going to give numbers," he says, "but I am certain I will have more children than 99.9 per cent of the population of the Western world. Double digit children. And they all adore me. They see me as their hero and the women who have my children see me as a hero. Everybody close to me respects me. Nobody has ever said that what I am doing is detrimental to the boys. Or the girls."
The trillionaire thing, I say later. Come on. What currency are we talking here?
"Zimbabwean," he grins. "Zimbabwe, bro."
He now says that this was a joke, although I've seen the video where he said it and it doesn't sound like a joke. It sounds like a mad lie.
Actually, it's quite hard to figure out how much money there really is here. He insists that Hustlers University was never his main income stream, but he won't tell me what is.
"I have various income streams," he says. "Substantial. Which I'm not prepared to disclose. I don't think any high… ultra-high net worth individual is going to sit with a reporter and tell him how he makes money."
But roughly, I say.
"I'm an influencer," he says. "I'm heavily into property. I have some media contracts."
Some reports suggest casinos. With my unpractised eye, I'd say there has to be a few million here or else he couldn't live as he does. There are a couple of million in cars out the front and there's probably another couple of million in the safe. At the same time, though, we're not talking yacht money. We're not tax-dodging in Monaco, after all, or on some private island. We're in a big breeze-block barn outside Bucharest. Let's keep it in perspective.
Levels of status
The funny thing is, having spent a couple of hours with Tate, I feel I understand him less well on leaving than I did when I arrived.
I was unprepared for how smart he is. It makes everything else not quite make sense. For one thing, there's his obsession with status, which is not just reductive but also oddly adolescent. He's 35 years old, and yet he still seems to feel that at the pinnacle of human success you would find not a captain of industry or a Hollywood star but a mid-level rapper or gangster. At one point, I also point out that there are levels of status here that we're simply not getting into, such as the way that, for all his women, he's deeply unlikely to date, say, Scarlett Johansson.
I think it makes him a bit cross.
He has aspirations to philanthropy and tells me he recently paid to rebuild a Romanian orphanage. He also tells me that depressed men email him constantly and he writes back. "I have saved thousands of men from depression," he says. "I have been fantastic for men's mental health. I have unlimited emails from people saying my son goes to the gym because of you, my son is starting to train because of you, my son is off antidepressants because of you." That Trump thing I mentioned – you can hear it, right? Recently, he says, he was emailed by a man who was thinking of killing himself. Tate told him to go to the gym. "And if he had emailed Scarlett Johansson," he says, perhaps not having quite understood my point there, "he would have been ignored."
Obviously I have no way of judging how much of this is true. It must be said, though, that Tate is at his very best on the plight of failing, invisible young men, and his advice to them – which is basically "earn some money and do some exercise and your life will get better" – is hard to fault. He's particularly good on the demonisation of working-class men, although he starts properly shouting about that at one point and I think gets a bit carried away.
"Men like me have a hugely important role in society," he says. "which is being removed, destroyed and demonised and decimated. And the same people who are telling people like me we shouldn't exist? When the shit really hits the fan? When it's trouble?"
"When it's a war?" I suggest weakly.
"When it's a war!" he says. "You don't call the f***ing feminist. You call Tate!"
Strictly speaking, I'm just not sure you do.
Where I get edgy, though, is with his need to contrast men's lot with women's.
"There are more invisible men than invisible women," he tells me.
"Are there?" I say.
"That's been proved," he says. "Scientifically."
"Has it?" I say.
His point is that in a nightclub, almost all women would be able to find somebody willing to have sex with them, while many men would not.
"They are the gatekeepers of the sexual marketplace," he keeps saying, which as well as being creepy as hell is also just a weird focus, particularly at his age. Why, in the end, is it all about sex in nightclubs? Why isn't it about jobs? We are not 14 years old.
The misogyny also just gets frustrating. You'd think you could argue about it but you cannot, because when a man fundamentally doesn't recognise a woman as being the same sort of thing as he is, there's actually nowhere to go. Although obviously this is more or less what he accuses me of in return when I worry at one point that, for example, a mafia warlord's girlfriend might not wholly be in charge of her own destiny.
"A question I would like to ask you," he says, "is what do you think of all the women who have stood up in defence of me? Do you think they're stupid?"
It's a fair question, and I'm not sure how to answer it. I know what he thinks of them, though, because he tells me.
"What I have noticed," he says, "is that 100 per cent of the women who have stuck up for me are objectively beautiful."
"Is that good?" I say.
"I don't know," he says, clearly having not considered that it might not be.
Maybe, I suggest, it's because these are the only women who have a place on Planet Tate.
"It certainly accelerates the hate from less attractive women," he says. " 'This f***ing Barbie, saying he's a good guy. She's hot, I'm fat.' "
I try to explain this isn't quite what I meant.
"I'm not in control of your calorie intake or her beauty," he says. "I'm just saying. It's an observation I have made."
To ban or not to ban?
I'm all for tech companies being free to ban whoever they like. What I do think, though, is they should explain precisely why they've done it. With Tate they haven't, either to him or in public. And the danger is that people will think it's about his politics.
Certainly he's on the right. Hope Not Hate has highlighted his defence of the EDL's Tommy Robinson. He clearly has that whole Trumpist Western decline thing going on and a fetish for the traditional, less liberal east.
He also – you may or may not be surprised to learn – is something of a conspiracy theorist. He thinks Covid was real but the response, he tells me, was "draconian and unnecessary and for ulterior motives".
Let's just say that none of this is to my taste. Neither, though, does any of it seem to cross the line into actual hate speech, racist or otherwise, not least because Tate himself is mixed race and his fanbase seems to include huge numbers of young Muslim men. He even has a habit of dropping words like "haram" into conversation, particularly when describing female behaviour he's not keen on. So whatever you think of him, I think it's important to know what his transgression actually was.
"There are rappers on Instagram and on social media today who have criminal charges against women," says Tate. "You can find Top Ten artists in the UK, drill artists, who have f***ing killed people and they're singing about doing it again." I'm not sure this last bit is strictly true, but you take the point. You can certainly find gangster films on Netflix. Is it right to worry less about teenage boys watching them? As the artist Laura Dodsworth – a rare Tate defender – pointed out on Talk TV the other week, the same boys that this is supposedly all for can very easily pop over to Pornhub any day of the week and see far, far worse. So why this one? Why him?
Perhaps you don't care. On a personal level, frankly, nor do I. We had a good chat, Tate and I, but the guy gives me the horrors. Not all the time, but enough of the time, I simply hate what he thinks. If I had a son, I'd hate the thought of him being exposed to it, and I'm far from wild about my daughters having to deal with teenage boys who have soaked it in. I even agonised about whether I ought to do this interview. Although if the most googled man on the planet can't be written about in a newspaper, then I'm honestly not sure what any of us are here for.
When we look back on the evolution of speech norms in the internet age, I do feel this case will have been an important one. What fascinates me about Tate is how neatly he sits on the fault line of this whole debate. Defending him makes me feel intensely uncomfortable, all dirty and complicit. Socially, professionally, perhaps even morally, it would be so much easier to delight in his downfall. I have to recognise the power of that. Yet I'm also far from convinced he's been treated fairly. He's not a niche troll or a political hatemonger. He's an entertainer who gives a sizeable constituency precisely what they want. And yes, that's horrid, but so what? We talk of these things today in terms of influence and radicalisation, but is that dynamic really anything new? Maybe he's just a video nasty. Maybe he's just a punk.
What Tate really is, I suppose, is a lesson in the sheer, uncurated chaos of the influencer economy; a study in who makes it big and why. And even social media is changing. Before his ban, Tate had 4 million followers on Instagram, which sounds like a lot, but isn't. Cristiano Ronaldo has 400 times as many, and Kylie Jenner not far off the same. Neither of them, though, was the most googled person in the world. Where Tate thrived was in video, chiefly YouTube and TikTok. It's the new frontier and it's where your kids spend their online lives, and regulators seem as lost as you or me. Banned or not, his content remains all over them. Like I said, it's a virus.
The day after his ban, at any rate, Tate posted a new video on a lesser-known platform in which he promised to do things differently. "This is a chance to move my social media purely to my charitable acts, even if my Instagram is reinstated," he said, contrite. "There will be no pictures of Bugattis any more. Sorry, gentlemen." Since then, though, he's posted seven or eight more and they're exactly as they always were. You'll see that if you google him. But don't.
Written by: Hugo Rifkind
© The Times of London