Veritasium (Derek Muller) Net Worth 2026: The Science Channel That Was Sold Without Anyone Noticing (Businesses, Income)
By TubeScope Editorial Team · 2026-09-08 · 11 min read
On Christmas Day 2025 the most-watched science channel on YouTube published a video asking, in its own title, whether its host was retiring. Derek Muller's answer was a disclosure most of his 21.2M subscribers had never heard: for two and a half years, Veritasium had been majority-owned by an investment firm, its videos now made by a team of more than thirty, and he would be around less. The reaction was muted, because the videos had never been better — the channel's biggest hit ever landed two weeks later. That is the whole story of Veritasium in one paragraph: a one-man channel that became a studio without anyone noticing, because the product got better.
Fast facts
- Real name: Derek Alexander Muller, born November 9, 1982, in Traralgon, Australia; raised in Vancouver, Canada, from the age of eighteen months (Wikipedia)
- Education: BASc in Engineering Physics, Queen's University, 2004; PhD in physics education research, University of Sydney, 2008 — thesis Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education (University of Sydney)
- Channel: @veritasium — 21.2M subscribers and 4,524,513,948 views on September 8, 2026, measured by our tracker (watch the live count); launched January 2011
- Ownership: majority owned by Electrify Video Partners since April 21, 2023; Muller retains a stake and became a shareholder in Electrify (Electrify)
- Team: more than thirty writers, directors, researchers, animators, and editors (Tubefilter)
- Other: Snatoms, a magnetic molecular modelling kit; documentaries for SBS and CuriosityStream; correspondent on Netflix's Bill Nye Saves the World
A PhD about why good explanations fail
The format was a research finding before it was a channel. For his doctorate, Muller tested how first-year physics students learned from videos and found something uncomfortable: students who watched a clear, polished explanation felt they understood it and learned almost nothing, while students shown a version in which someone stumbles through the wrong idea first improved significantly. “Some level of discomfort seems to be essential,” he told Scientific American. “That's when learning can really take place.”
He spent his PhD years teaching at a tutoring company, became its full-time head of science after 2008, and quit at the end of 2010 (Wikipedia). Veritasium — Latin veritas plus the suffix of an element — launched in January 2011 while he was still working fifteen hours a week. The signature move was in the first videos and never left: stop people in the street, let them state the misconception in their own words, then take it apart. A 2011 video on the distance to the moon was picked up by CBS; a TEDx talk followed in 2012; one million subscribers came in 2013 and ten million in 2021 (Scientific American). His stated ambition has not changed: “to be the good science teacher for those who never had a good science teacher.”
The videos that defined it
How An Infinite Hotel Ran Out Of Room (2021) sits at over 37 million views; Why No One Has Measured The Speed Of Light at 24 million. The bet video — A Physics Professor Bet Me The channel's turn toward investigation came with How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet (May 2025), an hour on PFAS chemicals that drew nearly three million views in its first day and more first-day watch time than any Veritasium video before it, released the same day the EPA announced it was rolling back PFAS limits (Scientific American). It won the 2025 AAAS Kavli Gold Award for in-depth video reporting and a 2026 Webby. Then, in January 2026, The Ridiculous Engineering Of The World's Most Important Machine, on the Dutch lithography company ASML, became the channel's best-performing video ever with 11.3 million views in seven days. Snatoms. In November 2015 Muller put a magnetic molecule-building kit on Kickstarter with a $42,000 goal; it funded in about an hour and closed at $519,852 from 6,581 backers. The company says it has sold 10,000 units and moved to Amazon. A modest business, but an early sign he thought about products. Electrify. On April 21, 2023 Electrify Video Partners, a London firm that buys stakes in YouTube channels, completed a majority investment in Veritasium, which then had thirteen million subscribers. The price was not disclosed; Electrify had said its deals run from several hundred thousand dollars to many millions. Muller kept an ownership interest, took shares in Electrify, and said the point was to “hand off a lot of those things and focus on my core passion of making great videos.” A figure of 80% appears in a 2026 Forbes headline we could not access and is unverified. What is verified is the effect: production costs quadrupled, subscribers rose by about half, videos now take two to six months to make, and the channel's own website is now copyrighted to Electrify US LLC. Muller's own summary: “The real way we've been able to grow is by adding more people.” Sponsorships. Integrations run per video — KiwiCo, Brilliant, and, once, Waymo — alongside Patreon. No litigation involving Muller or the channel appears in any source we could verify. What we can measure. On September 8, 2026 our tracker read 21.2M subscribers and 4,524,513,948 views, adding about 2,363,945 views a day across the preceding 9 days of snapshots. The channel posted 1 long-form video in the last 30 days and 6 in the last 90 — the last ten averaged 6,190,000 views and about 30 minutes. This is the low-frequency, high-effort pattern our calculator handles worst, so the figures below are deliberately conservative. Ads, by our method. In the Science niche — advertiser CPM of $3 to The business
Controversy timeline
So what does he actually earn?
