Just two years ago, he was selling balloons, doing drugs and shoplifting food. But now, he’s sitting in the same room as multimillionaires and discussing where to invest money. Find out more about the phenomenon of Russia’s leading TikTok influencer Danya Milokhin, whose popularity makes the country’s top businessmen lie on the floor, literally.
“I need to make a TikTok video, but to do it you’ll need to lie on the floor... Raise your hand who is ready to do it,” says Danya Milokhin, a 19-year-old guy in a pink shirt and an Adidas cap, at a session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), the country’s main business forum, which has Russian President Vladimir Putin among its speakers and where an entrance ticket this year cost almost one million rubles ($13,830).
Everyone raises their hand, including the marketing director of Russia’s largest bank Sber, a vice-president at Aliexpress in Russia and a former presidential candidate. A couple of seconds later, people in jackets and shirts are lying on the floor of the conference room, some with their legs raised and resting on the chairs. Milokhin is lying down on the desk. Dozens of cameras are filming the proceedings, which look totally out of character for an event like that.
“Somewhere at a serious event”
Milokhin is one of the most popular TikTok bloggers in Russia; he already has 12.9 million followers. According to Forbes, he makes 2 million rubles a month (approx. $28,000). In 2020, he won GQ’s ‘Discovery of the Year’ award. He posts videos with dances, his songs, jokes and challenges. The more shocking, the better. At the St. Petersburg economic forum, after the session and filming his TikTok video, he fled from journalists saying: “I need to pee.” Some were outraged by the very fact of his appearance at such an event: “This is some kind of surrealism!”; "The boy became famous not for his work, but for his trashy popularity on social media."
Not such a long time ago, Milokhin himself could not imagine such popularity. Two years ago, he was working as a waiter in Anapa in southern Russia, shoplifting “for fun” and spending all his money on drugs
Entrepreneurs Dmitry and Yelena Tyulenev took custody of the Milokhin brothers. They already had five children of their own. The two brothers moved into their house near Orenburg and, a year later, the family moved to Anapa, closer to the sea. But things were not easy. Danya was a difficult teenager: he refused to go to school, began to drink and smoke and did not always come home at night. The Tyulenevs often received visits from the police. The main cause of conflicts was that Danya did not want to study.
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