I mean I'd need to drop at least a half-mil just to really own the haters though. OIC and Swagginz would have to commit seppuku.
See:
To be fair, this is ROUGHLY what Phil was earning before... BY HIS OWN ADMISSION. I'm sure it was a generous estimate, but it's basically what cheers subs and tips amounted to, he said. We don't even know about those generous juicy BTS contributions, either. So yeah, Phil obscures how much he gets. Are you counting how much he used to get from cheersubantips during the vest streak, or just the tips? Paymetons? Youtube? The chargebacks that he actually wins, because he sure as fuck isn't telling us about those? It's not impossible to have a fairly accurate estimate, but it does require some digging.
He's definitely gonna have a 15K month at least, and he's sure as shit going to expect this support to continue, much like the vest streak was "unprecedented" before becoming the norm. And it's not about whether if Phil could hack it with 1%ers from the stock market, or big pharma people, it's mostly the fact that his empire is based on begging and crying poor.
How can a man, simultaneously, ask for enough money to pay the monthly rent DAILY, and keep crying poor, making up emergencies, hosting fundraisers, constantly crying that the sky is falling, while simultaneously denying that the sky is falling whenever someone calls attention to how he should be on YT and he should be worried since the urgency of his situation is so very dire?
Because he's a greasy scammer. That's the fundamental problem. That Phil Burnell makes top 3% yearly income by crying poor on the internet. And that these two things should, by definition and necessity, be mutually exclusive.
EDIT: If Phil had 5 million dollars he wouldn't give the fans so much as a goodbye video. He'd just quietly pack his bags, move to a mansion, put the wakhando up for sale and have someone else handle it and disappear from the internet forever. He hates that he's a laughingstock and he hates videogames, there's no reason for him to stick around. Maybe in 3-4 years he'd be back telling us all about how he did nothing wrong, he did everything correct but Kat just took him to the cleaners, while Downfromtherafters soars to uncontested #1 in every WWE Champions event.
One of the biggest issues Phil is facing in his career is how he's most likely not ever gonna be able to retire. Most showbiz people suffer from this even when they're succesful: They'll die of old age while still officially employed out of a sense of gratefulness to their fans and how they owe it to the world to still do the things they enjoy. Nobody really likes Phil, even the paypigs seem to help him in chase of an extremely misguided revenge against bullies, I.E people who see through the scam. To him, retirement followed by a name change and total radio silence would be a no brainer. He's not sticking around for his fans, either, he's purely still here because of money.
Unless this massive squeeze he's putting on the paypigs right now is the REAL ten year plan, and what that meant all along was just ten years of no holds barred begging until he has enough money to not have to work any more. Problem with that is, Phil's completely incapable of budgeting or cutting down his expenses, so after a year or two of radio silence, we'd be back at square 1. Specially if he didn't kick his gacha addiction.