Jawed Karim: The YouTube Founder Who Turned Me at the Zoo Into Protest

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In 2004, Jawed Karim was an engineer at PayPal, working alongside Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, and he could not find online footage of the two events everyone was talking about: the Super Bowl halftime show and the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Video on the internet then meant sketchy downloads, rival media players, and corrupted files. The three built a fix: a single place where anyone could upload a heavy file and have it converted into a standard format that played from a simple link in any browser.

This episode traces what happened to the test clip. On April 23, 2005, at 8:31 p.m. Pacific time, Karim stood before the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo while his high school friend Yakov Lapitsky held the camera. He remarked on the length of the animals' trunks and said that was pretty much all there was to say. Nineteen seconds long, unscripted and unpolished, it told viewers the platform was for them, not for studios. It has since become a museum piece and, in its founder's hands, a billboard the company cannot take down.

• As of October 2026 the clip has passed 440 million views. The zoo's 2020 comment on it became the most liked comment on the platform, with nearly five million likes.
• London's Victoria and Albert Museum added the video to its permanent collection in early 2026 after a conservation team spent 18 months reconstructing the original 2005 webpage.
• In late 2013 Karim rewrote the video's description to attack the requirement that users hold a Google Plus account just to comment.
• When public dislike counts were hidden in late 2021, he changed the description again, arguing that if every creator thought the move was a bad idea, the company was in the wrong.
• In 2023 he swapped in a parody thumbnail with glowing eyes and stampeding animals. By early 2025 the description warned about microplastics in the human brain and split the 19 seconds into chapters.