April 23, 2005: At 8:31 PM Pacific Time, 11:31 Eastern Time, "Me at the zoo" becomes the 1st video uploaded to YouTube.
It is uploaded by Jawed Karim, a co-founder of YouTube. Karim, then 25 years old, described the elephants in the San Diego Zoo, in front of a video camera operated by a friend from high school, Yakov Lapitsky.
The video is 18 seconds long, with Karim saying, "All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants. And the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks. And that's, that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say."
Karim turned out to be a much better businessman than commentator. With Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, whom he met while working at PayPal, he founded YouTube. By October 2006, it had already become so successful that Google bought it from them for $1.65 billion.
Born in Germany to a German mother and a Bangladeshi father, Karim went to high school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and got degrees from the University of Illinois and Stanford. After selling YouTube, he got in on the ground floors of Airbnb and Reddit.
As of April 23, 2025, the original video has over 354 million views.
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