Pete Davidson made headlines last week when he announced that influencers making $40 million a year prove “the world’s broken.” Sophie Rain, who reportedly earns around $45 million a year, would like a word.
“I’d tell him that if it’s really that easy, he should go do it,” Rain rebutted. She didn’t stop at the dare, either. Davidson had already floated the idea of starting his own OnlyFans in the same breath as mocking everyone who has one, and Rain noticed. “He literally joked about starting an OnlyFans himself, so clearly he understands there’s money in it,” she said. “But if you think people are making millions by accident, you probably don’t understand the business very well.”
The part that seems to have stung Rain the most is the vagueness. Davidson never named anyone, ranting about girls “talking to themselves” online and asking “Who the f–k are you? What do you do? Nothing.” Rain, 22, thought the whole bit sounded pretty targeted at creators like her, and took the lack of names as cowardly. “I mean, if you’re going to complain about girls making millions online, you might as well say who you’re talking about,” she said. She also commented “@me next time” on the Instagram clip, which is the Gen Z equivalent of asking to take it outside.
Rain’s actual rebuttal is a detailed answer to the question Davidson asked in bad faith: what do you do? According to her, a lot. “I’m constantly filming, shooting, editing, planning content, talking to fans, looking at analytics, coordinating shoots, traveling, and working with my team,” she said. “There are days where I’m working from the moment I wake up until I go to bed. Just because the finished product looks effortless doesn’t mean it was effortless to make.” Her broader point is that judging a creator’s job by a single 60-second clip is like judging a restaurant by one bite. “It’s easy to look at a 60-second video and say, ‘What does this person even do?’ when you have no idea what goes into building an audience or running a business online,” she said. “I get that he’s a comedian, but the whole ‘these girls do nothing’ thing is just lazy.”
Rain is a perfect example of how much content creation can change your life, but also how much work it takes to make that happen. Rain grew up in Miami on food stamps, joined OnlyFans in May 2023, and has built a business that pulls in tens of millions annually. And she has strict boundaries about what she will and won’t do on camera, while sticking to content she describes as lingerie-and-bikini-level suggestive teasing. That discipline is part of the work, too. She also has 15.4 million followers on TikTok alone, and anyone who thinks that doesn’t take work and strategy has no idea what they’re talking about.
Rain also found the irony hard to resist. Davidson doesn’t have any social media at all. He’s said before that the negative comments left him feeling like “mentally it was destroying me,” and he quit. So a man that couldn’t handle the pressures of online platforms is trying to lecture creators about the labor of being online? Got it.
Rain did note she’s never met him, never been in his DMs, and doesn’t think his romantic résumé qualifies him on the subject. “Pete has never tried to date me or slid into my DMs. Maybe that’s why he’s so confused about what I do,” she quipped. Davidson, recently single after splitting from Elsie Hewitt, has dated Kim Kardashian, Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale and Emily Ratajkowski. “Clearly he has something going for him,” Rain said. “I just don’t think dating famous women automatically makes you an expert on women who built businesses online.”
Davidson’s rant is the same one a lot of people have in private: a suspicion that anyone earning this much from content that looks this simple must be getting away with something. But Rain makes it clear that no matter how effortless polished content looks, there’s a ton of infrastructure behind it. Just like there has been since screens were invented. Funny people have been getting rich off making hard things look easy forever. Davidson, of all people, should recognize the trick.
Rain says Davidson may have handed her a Halloween costume, too. “Maybe I’ll dress up as someone who ‘does nothing’ and somehow still works 12-hour days,” she said.