Disney & Maker Studios drop Pewdiepie after anti-semitic joke

Felix "Pewdiepie" Kjellberg is a major YouTuber with millions of subscribers. His videos reach a massive audience and are loved, and hated, by the larger internet community. He often says and does whatever he wants and quite often pushes the boundaries. But it now seems that Disney, the owner of his YouTube network Maker Studios, have had their fill and have dropped the personality after he made an anti-Semitic joke during one of his videos. 

Pewdiepie haired a pair of Indian men from the hiring site Fiverr to hold up a sign that said "Death to all Jews." The duo then proceeded to chant the saying a few times, much to the delight of Felix and the audience. Felix, for his part, claims it was all a joke (we agree with him) stating that "I didn't think they'd actually do it." Fiverr is a site where you can hire people to do tasks you assign them. Felix has a number of videos where he tries to hire people on Fiverr to do really off and inappropriate things just to see if they will.  

Pewdiedpie is well known for pushing boundaries and this wasn't the first time he has been in trouble with his network. Disney paid somewhere in the ballpark of $500 - $675 millions dollars for Maker Studios back in 2014 obviously had no idea about all the content the networks creators were dishing out. Pewdiepie has always been somewhat of a problem for the family friendly Disney who wants to use Maker Studios as its online arm.  

Maker Studios also stepped in regarding the situation stating that "Although Felix has created a following by being provocative and irreverent, he clearly went too far in this case and the resulting videos are inappropriate." They followed this up by stating that they were terminating their association with Pewdiepie. Felix himself seems to understand the situation and has released his own statement saying "Though this was not my intention, I understand that these jokes were ultimately offensive."

No word on what sort of financial hit this will be to Felix, but we do know that his YouTube channel brings in some seven figures a year. His numbers are strong enough that even without Maker Studios he will be fine, but without a network supporting him, future legal challenges and claims against his channel could tie him up personally. Having a network behind you means they take care of all the details and leave the content creating to, well, the content creators. 

UPDATE: YouTube has now made a statement regarding the matter and has distanced itself from one of its most popular stars. The company has pulled the plug on the second season of Pewdiepie's YouTube Red show “Scare PewDiePie" as well as removing his channel from their premier advertising program.