Alex Choi’s net worth: it’s not as awesome as you think it is

Alex Choi’s net worth: it’s not as awesome as you think it is

Alex Choi is doing well for himself. He’s popular across social media, has his own business, and cruises around with his friends in cars more expensive than most of us can dream of owning. But how well is he actually doing? According to my estimates, Alex Choi’s net worth is at least $830,000. Realistically, it’s more like $1 million considering the value of his growing social media channels.

Those… are huge numbers. However, it’s not as much as I was expecting it would be considering how well-known he is in the automotive community.

Let me break it down for you…

The Step-by-Step Process of How I Calculated Alex Choi’s Net Worth

Net worth is the term used to describe the monetary value of everything a person owns. That includes every bank account, piece of real estate, business venture, and yes, expensive cars. To calculate the total net worth, I broke Alex’s money down into three major categories:

  1. annual income
  2. significant assets
  3. liabilities.

Because most people don’t usually post exactly how much they spend on things all over the internet, nor do they show off everything that they own, all of these calculations are my best estimates for Alex’s worth based on typical industry pricing and earnings.

This means there’s a huge margin for error here, and I personally think there’s a chance that he’s worth a lot more than I guessed because of his popularity. Let’s dive into each of the categories in more detail.

Alex Choi’s Annual Income

Alex Choi is a professional social media influencer, so that’s where he started. Alex’s YouTube channel, which was created in 2017, has, as of writing, more than 679k subscribers and 52.4 million total views. This means that he’s more than eligible to monetize his videos. While the exact rate varies from video to video and depending on the particular advertiser, it typically falls between $0.25 and $4 CPM, or cost per thousand impressions.

  • Using the popular estimation tool Social Blade, I was able to calculate his average daily views at roughly 5,700, putting his estimated ad revenue between $495 and $7.9k per year. Let’s take the median point for simplicity’s sake and say he earns about $4.2k per year from YouTube.
  • He also has an extremely popular Instagram account with more than 770K followers. Instagram doesn’t have a direct partner program like YouTube, but creators can be paid by independent sponsors to advertise products on their page, so I counted it as part of his income.
  • His engagement rate is fairly average at about 11%, and because the cost per post can vary a lot (I used HypeAuditor and Influencer Marketing Hub to estimate $2.3k and $20.1k), let’s assume it’s somewhere in the middle of the lower range at about $8.9k per post.

Going through his accounts, it was difficult to tell which of his posts were sponsored, so let’s estimate that he’s being sponsored at least once a month, giving him $106.8k per year.

Alex Choi portrait
You’d be smiling too if you made as much coin as Alex Choi

This isn’t even including his drone business or any merchandise he might sell. I couldn’t find any specific financial information about either of those ventures, unfortunately, but going off of the average price of influencer merchandise, we can estimate that he’s making between $700 and $3.7k per year, so let’s go with $2.1k.

That puts his annual income at around $115k at a very conservative guess, and at most about $250k.

Alex Choi’s Significant Assets

Cars

Obviously, Alex’s cars are a big part of his life. They’re gorgeous, top-of-the-line sports cars, so they’re definitely going to add quite a big chunk to his net worth. To estimate out how big, I broke down the cars that he has at the time of this writing (and how much they’re each worth).

Note that this estimate will change as his collection of cars changes, so this is just an example of how any given combination of cars can affect his total net worth.

Alex owns (or has owned): a Lamborghini Huracan, an Audi RS7, a BMW M7, and a McLaren 720s. The average retail price for each car is as follows:

  • The Lamborgini Huracan costs between $160k and $333k, so let’s go with $246.5k
  • The Audi RS7 costs $114,000
  • The BMW M7 costs $86,800, and
  • The McLaren 720s costs between $295k and $407.8k, so let’s go with $351.4k

Clothing

Alex wears a lot of designer products. For instance, he owns a set of custom Yeezys worth at least $500. He also owns at least one more set of Yeezys, a number of designer shirts, and several brand-name flat brim hats, all of which could account for at least another $1k, so let’s assume that he’s got a wardrobe worth around another $2k.

Alex choi
Alex Choi is actually more fashionable than this. Maybe I should have chosen a better image to put here? Nah…

Note that this is the first time I have ever included clothing into one of my automotive YouTuber net worth estimates. That being said, clothing (and accessories) can be considered a major asset. For example, part of Magnus Walker’s high net worth is because of his impressive watch collection.

Real Estate

Normally, I’d consider a house in a net worth calculation, but there are two problems with that when it comes to Alex Choi:

  1. He’s young, so he might still live with his parents (despite what he tells us)
  2. Secondly, the “might” is about as much information as I could find on where he lives, other than the fact that he lives in Los Angeles. Without any concrete information to go off of, I won’t add that into his worth.

All of this (because the cars mostly) adds another $800k to Alex’s net worth.

Alex Choi’s Liabilities (How He Spends His Money)

Legal Issues

The biggest issue I can see with Alex Choi’s net worth is his history of legal trouble. He’s also frequently in trouble with the law for speeding and other infractions.

He was arrested in 2018 for refusing to comply and earlier that same year for attending an illegal stunt show. Assuming his tickets are about $70 (middle of the road for speeding, his most common infraction) and he gets three per year, and let’s say his bail is $500 for both arrests, that’s $710 at least in legal fees.

Car Destruction (and Repairs)

He also frequently ruins his expensive cars for the sake of getting views and likes on social media. 

Considering the average cost of repairs is between $10k and $50k (depending on parts of course) for the Lamborghini alone, and he seems to need repairs at least once per month, let’s estimate that he spends about $400k on repairs annually.

That’s $400k in liabilities right there. At least. it could be a lot less if he’s getting any fees waived or not getting into as much trouble as I’m assuming. He could also be getting a lot of that repair work done with sponsorships.

Taking everything into consideration, I calculate the net worth of Alex Choi to be at least $830,000

This is all based on the my middle-of-the-road and conservative estimates of course. There are also several assets I can’t assess easily, such his drone business’s annual income, which could add a significant amount to the final total. Some things we’ll just never know…

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