Mark Rober spent nine years as an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, seven of them on the Curiosity rover, before a Halloween costume video in 2011 started the YouTube channel that made him famous.1 This month #TeamSeas, the ocean-cleanup drive he ran with MrBeast, turns five. This fall his company also released Class CrunchLabs, a free science curriculum for grades 3 to 8, with YouTube as a partner.2
That career puts him on unrelated lists: science YouTubers, NASA engineers, charity campaigns, kids' TV, BYU graduates, people from Orange County. We put him on 14 of them.
Mark Rober ranks highest on the lists he built himself, YouTube and the charity drives and the build boxes, and lowest in the places that built him: NASA, BYU, Orange County.
Mark Rober vs PewDiePie: the greatest YouTubers of all time
The greatest-YouTubers list is the broadest question here, and it is mostly a list of entertainers. MrBeast, PewDiePie, Markiplier, Jenna Marbles and Casey Neistat built their audiences on personality, gaming and daily vlogs.
Rober built his on engineering. His channel has passed 83 million subscribers and 19 billion views,1 numbers that put a mechanical engineer in the same tier as the platform's comedians.
PewDiePie is the useful comparison. His channel was the most-subscribed on YouTube for most of the 2010s and defined what a YouTuber was. Rober's case rests on what he made the platform do instead: teach physics to children who thought they were watching a prank.
Veritasium vs Mark Rober: the best science YouTuber
This ranking is the one the title asks about. It holds 14 science channels, among them Veritasium, Vsauce, SmarterEveryDay, Periodic Videos, 3Blue1Brown and NileRed.
Rober's claim is reach. No other channel on the list has his audience, and his videos get watched by people who would never search for a physics lesson. The squirrel obstacle course hides a lesson in problem-solving inside a backyard heist, and kids watch it for the squirrels.
Derek Muller's Veritasium has the opposite claim: depth. His videos run long, take on misconceptions directly and often end with the viewer having been wrong. Grant Sanderson's 3Blue1Brown and Brady Haran's Numberphile make the same case for maths. If the question is who teaches the most science per minute, Rober's spectacle works against him.
Carl Sagan and the greatest science communicators
Outside YouTube, on the list of science communicators of any era, Rober joins a list that starts with Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking.
His credentials here are real but recent. He won the Streamy Award in a science or education category four years running, 2019 to 2022.1 Sagan's Cosmos aired on public television in 1980, and Attenborough has been making natural history films since the 1950s.
The list also holds TV names who shaped Rober's style. Bill Nye, Adam Savage of MythBusters and Don Herbert, who ran kitchen-table experiments as Mr. Wizard in the 1950s, all taught science by blowing something up first and explaining it second.
Colin Furze's shed and the best maker YouTubers
Maker YouTube is the genre where Rober's builds compete with other builds, not with lectures. The list includes Colin Furze, Simone Giertz, Stuff Made Here, Michael Reeves, William Osman and Adam Savage's Tested.
Rober brings the biggest budget and the most polish. His team builds things like a giant Super Soaker, a Nerf blaster many times the toy's size and a dartboard that moves itself under the dart.
Colin Furze is the counterweight. A former plumber from Lincolnshire, he builds jet-powered go-karts and dug a secret bunker under his garden, mostly alone and with visible weld spatter. For a lot of makers, one man in a shed is the purer form of the craft.
Glitter bomb vs Gangnam Style: viral YouTube videos
Rober's best-known single video appears on a list of YouTube landmarks. Gangnam Style was the first video to pass a billion views; Me at the Zoo was the first video uploaded at all; Charlie Bit My Finger and Double Rainbow defined the home-video era.
The glitter bomb arrived in December 2018. Rober built a decoy package that sprayed glitter and fart spray on whoever stole it from his porch, filmed the thieves with hidden phones and posted the results. It drew 25 million views in its first day.1
It is also the video with an asterisk. Rober later removed two of the five thefts after learning the thieves were friends of a person he had hired.1 Against Gangnam Style, a pop song that changed how YouTube counted views, a prank with a correction attached is a smaller landmark.
Squirrel maze vs the Tesla wall: Mark Rober's best video
Here every option is a Rober video, so the question is which of his own projects matters most. The 14 entries run from the early Pinewood Derby physics video to the liquid-sand hot tub and the egg dropped from the edge of space.
The squirrel obstacle course is the popular pick. Rober built a ninja-warrior course to keep squirrels off his bird feeder, and the original video had 114 million views by September 2023, before two sequels.1
The self-driving car test is the divisive pick. In March 2025 he pitted a Tesla on Autopilot against a lidar-equipped Lexus, and the Tesla drove through a wall painted to look like the road ahead, Wile E. Coyote style.3 Tesla owners argued the test was unfair; others called it the most useful thing he has made.
#TeamSeas vs the Ice Bucket Challenge: internet charity fundraisers
Rober co-founded two of the eight campaigns on this list, both with MrBeast, and both priced so a donor could picture the result.
#TeamTrees in 2019 promised one tree per dollar and raised more than $24 million through the Arbor Day Foundation.4 #TeamSeas launched on 29 October 2021 with one pound of trash removed per dollar, split between Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup, and passed its goal at 34 million pounds.5
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is the strongest rival. In 2014 it spread across social media without a single creator in charge, and it funded research rather than a fixed count of trees. Captain Tom Moore's garden laps, Games Done Quick's speedrun marathons and France's Z Event make the case for other models: one man, one community, one weekend.
Influence in the 2020s: Khaby Lame, MrBeast and an engineer
The most-influential-personalities list is about the decade, not the career. It holds TikTok stars Khaby Lame and Charli D'Amelio, streamers Kai Cenat, IShowSpeed and Pokimane, and MrBeast.
Most of them are measured in attention. Rober's influence is easier to see offline: in classrooms, in a subscription box on a kitchen table, and in the money his campaigns moved. Class CrunchLabs, the free curriculum he launched with YouTube this fall, is built for teachers rather than for a feed.
Khaby Lame is the contrast in the frame. He became TikTok's most-followed creator without saying a word, by silently showing how simple an overcomplicated life hack could be.
CrunchLabs among the brands founded by creators
Rober founded CrunchLabs in 2022 as a subscription service: each month a box arrives with a toy to build and a video in which he explains the physics behind it.
The rest of this list mostly sells things to eat, drink or wear. MrBeast's Feastables chocolate, Logan Paul and KSI's Prime Hydration, Emma Chamberlain's coffee and Gymshark's gym clothes compete for shelf space in supermarkets and malls.
CrunchLabs is the only brand here whose product is homework that children ask for. No other brand on the list sells education, and none is built to keep selling after the founder stops posting.
Bill Nye the Science Guy and the best science shows for kids
Mark Rober's CrunchLabs became a Netflix series on 19 November 2025 and had four seasons on the service by the end of May 2026.6 That puts it on a list of children's science television that goes back to the 1980s.
The competition is a generation's worth of classroom TV: Bill Nye the Science Guy, The Magic School Bus, Beakman's World, Mr. Wizard's World. Bill Nye's show ran on PBS through the 1990s and was wheeled into science classes on a TV cart for years after.
The Netflix series is mostly Rober's YouTube videos re-cut for television. Fans already know the material, which weakens it on a list of shows that were made for TV from the first frame.
Beast Games and the shows YouTubers made for TV
The same Netflix show meets a different crowd here: YouTubers who moved to television. Beast Games on Prime Video, Ms. Rachel on Netflix, the Sidemen's Inside, The Dude Perfect Show on CMT and Ryan Kaji's Ryan's Mystery Playdate on Nick Jr. all made the jump.
Rober's show has grown past the compilation format. Camp CrunchLabs, a summer spin-off with new experiments and guests, premiered on 8 June 2026.6
Beast Games is the obvious rival because it shares a co-founder of #TeamSeas. MrBeast built a $5 million competition from scratch for streaming; Rober started by repackaging his archive. Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue and RWBY make a third case: web series that became franchises long before either man had a TV deal.
Margaret Hamilton vs Mark Rober: NASA's most famous engineers
Rober's engineering career is real. Most of his JPL decade went into Curiosity, the rover that landed on Mars in August 2012. From 2015 to early 2020 he was a product designer in Apple's Special Projects Group.
On a list of NASA's famous engineers, that résumé puts him among the junior names. The field includes Wernher von Braun, who led the Saturn V rocket; Margaret Hamilton, whose team wrote the Apollo guidance software; flight director Gene Kranz; and Mary Jackson, NASA's first Black female engineer.
Two JPL colleagues complicate the picture. Adam Steltzner led Curiosity's sky-crane landing, and Bobak Ferdowsi became famous as "Mohawk Guy" during the same landing night. Rober is the most famous of the three, and his fame came from what he did after he left. That is the honest case for him, and also the case against him.
Steve Young and the most famous BYU alumni
Rober earned his mechanical engineering degree at Brigham Young University in 2004, the year he joined JPL.
BYU's famous graduates lean towards football and politics. Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young, Heisman winner Ty Detmer, Super Bowl champion Jim McMahon and senator Mitt Romney all went through Provo, alongside Jeopardy! record holder Ken Jennings and novelists Brandon Sanderson and Stephenie Meyer.
The list also holds Philo Farnsworth, who studied at BYU in the 1920s and went on to invent electronic television. For an engineer-entertainer, he is the alumnus with the closest résumé.
Brea to Yorba Linda: famous people from Orange County
Rober grew up in Brea, a small city in northern Orange County. Richard Nixon was born a few miles away in Yorba Linda.
The county's famous list is heavy with names that reach every household: Tiger Woods from Cypress, Michelle Pfeiffer from Santa Ana, Gwen Stefani from Anaheim, Will Ferrell from Irvine and Steve Martin, who grew up in Garden Grove and worked at Disneyland as a teenager.
This is the hardest list for him.
Fourteen lists, one engineer
Rober looks biggest where he built the room himself: a science channel, two charity campaigns, a toy-box company and a Netflix slot. In the institutions that trained him he is one capable alumnus among presidents, quarterbacks and Apollo engineers. Every list here is sorted by people choosing between two options; how pairwise comparison works explains how those choices add up to an order.
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More rankings, more angles
- Is MrBeast the Biggest YouTuber? 500 Million Subscribers, 12 Lists — Rober's #TeamSeas partner, from game shows to chocolate
- YouTube: Best Streaming Service or Best Social Network? 16 Lists — the platform both men built careers on
- Apollo Moon Landing: Greatest Human Achievement? 16 Lists — von Braun, Hamilton and the Saturn V
Sources
- Wikipedia — Mark Rober (biography: JPL and Curiosity years, Apple, YouTube start in 2011, Streamy Awards 2019–2022, glitter bomb views and correction, squirrel maze views, #TeamSeas launch date, raised in Brea): en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-03)
- Tubefilter — YouTube joins Mark Rober's Class CrunchLabs, a free science curriculum for grades 3–8: tubefilter.com (checked 2026-10-03)
- Futurism via Yahoo Tech — Mark Rober's Tesla Autopilot vs lidar test and the painted wall, 17 March 2025: tech.yahoo.com (checked 2026-10-03)
- #TeamTrees — campaign site: $1 per tree, more than $24 million raised, Arbor Day Foundation: teamtrees.org (checked 2026-10-03)
- #TeamSeas — campaign site: $1 per pound, 34 million pounds, Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup: teamseas.org (checked 2026-10-03)
- What's on Netflix — Mark Rober's CrunchLabs season dates and Camp CrunchLabs premiere: whats-on-netflix.com (checked 2026-10-03)