Twenty-Five Million Reasons He Came Back

Casey Neistat sold his video app Beme to CNN for around $25 million and, flush with it, announced he was stepping back from the daily vlogs that had made him famous. Reasonable. The man had skated across New York, flown first class around the world, and documented approximately every waking hour of his life on camera for years. A break made sense.

It didn’t last. Neistat announced he’s returning to vlogging because, apparently, he missed it. Which is either a touching statement about the intrinsic worth of creative work, or evidence that $25 million in your account with nothing left to build is its own particular kind of hell. Money alone doesn’t make you happy—that’s what people without money tend to say. Neistat seems to have confirmed it empirically.

His videos have always been compulsively watchable in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who doesn’t follow YouTube. The skating, the travel, the relentless kinetic editing—none of it should work as well as it does. But there’s something real in the restlessness, the compulsion to document everything and then cut it into something worth watching. He couldn’t quit. Of course he’s back.