“This video may be inappropriate for some users,” YouTube warns me after I select a video posted by 28-year-old Texan Kaitlyn Siragusa, who is better known online as the hot tub tsarina of Twitch, Amouranth.
“I understand and wish to proceed,” I click in response.
According to TwitchTracker, Amouranth is one of the platform’s 50 most-subscribed to streamers and, Stream Charts indicates, the most-watched woman streamer, with 8.3 million combined hours of viewing time. Shunning all content warnings and starting to consume every gumdrop of Amouranth content online would take you a separate lifetime—Siragusa started streaming on Twitch in 2017 and streams in 12-hour shifts, she tells me over the phone. But it would also give you a near-complete render of a woman who dedicates her waking hours to being everything to everyone.
To some, she’s the incarnation of the internet’s bikini-clad depravity. Others delude themselves into thinking she’s their wife. For her financial team, which advises her through what she calls “safe, sticky” investments in companies like Visa, Google, Twitch, gas stations, inflatable pool manufacturers, and so on, she’s a model student. She has a minority stake in a plastic ball company. She bought a 7-11 with a car wash for $8.3 million. But she isn’t a retired e-girl wearily shuffling toward a remixed version of herself, Kendall Roy out of left field with $900 Lanvin sneakers. Amouranth is and always was about business.
When Kotaku last spoke to Siragusa in July, 2021, she was treading the choppy waters between platforms’ content policies, most of them unfriendly to the type of smutty content she creates, and her viewers’ craving for more smutty content. (Alarmingly, some wanted more of her still, as they made clear through personal messages and boundary-free trips to her house.) As a social media star, Siragusa is still happy to cross a few lines—her bikini is a livestream mainstay, though she hasn’t been banned from Twitch since 2021—and she accepts the precariousness of seeming so available online. But, in only a year, Siragusa has started grounding her wealth in less volatile projects, secure income streams unrelated to her existing empire.
Read More: Amouranth Is Twitch’s Smartest Troll, But She’s On Thin Ice
“It’s funny to see the progression I’ve made, as far as the press goes,” she said. “When I first started […] whatever Twitch antics I was doing, it was, like, ‘Twitch E-girl’ or ‘Twitch Thot,’ and now it’s like ‘Businesswoman, 7-11 Owner’…it kind of reminds me of Daenerys’ titles growing, like, ‘Mother of Dragons,’ ‘Breaker of Chains.’”
In that 2021 interview, Siragusa said “I know that the whole hot girl thing obviously physically can’t last forever,” and she repeats this sentiment throughout our conversation. But “Amouranth,” the version of herself she presents to millions of eager fans, is not so easy to skim off Kaitlyn since her typical work day pushes 20 hours. (Regarding the four hours that leaves for sleep, Siragusa said “I survive, I wouldn’t say I thrive.”)
Siragusa says she doesn’t actually feel like she has a persona since, with streaming 12 hours a day, “I would be my persona more than me. I don’t think I really play a character so much.” But in some respects, Amouranth eclipses Kaitlyn like a tall shadow. “I compare myself a lot to my photos,” she said. “That’s when I’m feeling the worst. Like, ‘ugh! In this photo, my abs are popping, and now I have my period.’ Yeah, it gets to me. But I take a deep breath and remember that it’s a picture. It’s not realistic.”
“Amouranth,” the girl who pretends to suck on your ear, who created around $80,000 worth of property damage for Siragusa after her overused hot tub flooded the house, is a slightly more excitable version of herself, Siragusa said. The real Siragusa has no time for dating (not even on the apps—if you see her, that’s a catfish), and is wary of potential suitors seeing her as “some kind crazy freak” because of her content. But sleep, self-esteem, and dumb boys can wait—Amouranth is a means to an end.
Twitch may be crucial to building her brand and her fame but it’s not one of her biggest sources of income. In 2021, she told the financial newsletter Investment Talk that she made a total of $133,000 a month from Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok combined. That probably sounds pretty good, but it’s not the most staggering number she has to offer. Right now, according to Siragusa, the money she expects in an average month of being Amouranth looks approximately like this: $1.5 million from OnlyFans, $100,000 from Patreon, and over $100,000 from Fansly.
Those are burst-a-vein-in-your-eyeball numbers, but Siragusa does not see herself as “wealthy.” She doesn’t see herself as a feminist (“That word never really felt like it fit me”) or as part of the gaming community (“I kind of just enjoy games on my own”), either. But about the wealth, Siragusa said “my parents made a total of $50,000 a year after working at their jobs for 20 years. That was with their promotions and bonuses and taking care of three kids. I’m pretty used to being frugal, and my mindset is still a lot like that.”
“I kind of feel a disconnect to the wealth—like, I know it’s there, and I know that I’m incredibly lucky, but […] maybe the most bougie thing I do is I order takeout constantly,” she continued. “I drive a Jeep, it’s a good dog car, and I don’t really buy designer clothes or anything. I don’t go out and party, and I don’t have any luxury vehicles.”
Siragusa is dutifully stacking her hot girl gold so that she can one day create an animal sanctuary, ideally for dogs and maybe also horses, a dream she’s nourished for years. When I tell people this Amouranth fact, they always express surprise and a little disbelief that a woman who trollishly decided to sell her farts has the Hallmark card desire to give pets a better life. But when Siragusa talks about it, she’s dead serious.
Growing up the only girl and the youngest of three kids, one thing she remembers most clearly from her childhood is feeling alone.
“The only friends that I really had for a long time were the dogs in my street,” she said. “They would just come up to the front yard—that’s where I would always play—and they would just turn over for belly rubs. I had formed a connection with them from a young age.”
At age 12, Siragusa got her first dog, which she talks about with soft pride like a girl who plucked the most tender peach off the tree (the dog’s name was Shadow, “a flat-coated retriever mixed with chow. Beautiful dog,” she said). Later, she adopted the German Shepherd mix Vigo, who died in the middle of the night suddenly from bloat in 2017.
“His stomach essentially twisted on itself while expanding with air and it cut off all of his organs, and he collapsed, started seizing up, and then just died within 30 minutes,” she said. “It was very heartbreaking to watch.” It stuck with her, that painful night, and it motivates her through days of neverending screen time.
But not yet. Siragusa feels like she’s maybe a decade away from actualizing her dream, since she’d like to first build up her “resources and make connections. I want to get experience first in the shelter space before we dive into it,” she said. Her saving and investing is going well, and so she feels she’s on a good trajectory, but first she needs to “grind,” a word that came up in our conversation 12 times.
“I wish there was 48 hours [in a day], even though that may not be enough,” Siragusa said.
Remember that this is a woman who doesn’t sleep. For her investments, the plastic balls and all, Siragusa has a “Do you use it? Yeah? Oh, well let’s invest,” approach, she said. Unlike with her salacious streams, she wants no risk in investments.
Outside of investing, she recently founded the nascent talent agency Real Work that links creators to personal assistants. (Siragusa takes on responsibility like her day is a piece of toast: more butter, more jam.) Despite announcing that she would leave OnlyFans this summer, she decided to stay on to best assist Real Work clients who rely on the platform. She also produced a competitive game show where streamers bonk each other with giant Q-tips called Streamer Royale, and acts as brand advisor for NSFW NFT marketplace Shush Club.
“I just like to diversify,” she said about her involvement in cryptocurrency. “I never know what’s going to pop off next, and I kind of want to dip my toes into everything, just in case.”
More is more. As a kid, Siragusa picked up HTML from Neopets and would spend 10-hour chunks creating graphics. In her teenage years, she’d toil on cosplay outfits for about the same amount of time. “I can really dive into creative outlets and grind that, like, all day for days,” she said. “When I started seeing the opportunity with streaming and content creation, I decided to just transfer over that ‘grind’ ability and put it to work.”
In that spirit, she’d like to create a convention, possibly in the next year, that will have “a blend” of “everything all at once,” she said. “Pop culture, gaming, comics, anime, general geek and nerd fandoms.” She also thinks doing voice acting or picking up a few hosting gigs could be fun.
But the logistics of some hypothetical ventures are unknown and the future is an unrolled rug. Siragusa still has Twitch, the birthplace of her infamy. There, Siragusa typically streams within the “Just Chatting” or “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches” categories, both of which her bedroom’s glittering tub waters came to define over the years. Occasionally, she plays games like Raid and lets herself become gamer girl fodder for salivating commenters that ask “have you ever had a nightmare that you opened your robe on stream but forgot your bikini top??”
On YouTube, OnlyFans, Fansly, and, to a lesser extent because of PayPal’s limitations on adult transactions, Patreon, Siragusa gets her flock’s bellies more full with more explicit content—polyester robes held dangerously open by tape on YouTube, mouthfuls of pizza chewed thoughtfully before she bares “Her NAKED TITS on Stream!!!” on OnlyFans.
Amouranth’s body, as a woman’s body is wont to do online, has accidentally created an alarming stock of lovesick creepazoids, stalkers, and a swatting “problem” that Siragusa tells me isn’t really a “problem” on account of her guns, cameras, security guards, and friendly relationship with local cops. But her rapacious fans and some of their fantasies terrify me. They certainly don’t please Siragusa, although, during our conversation, she struck me as remarkably well-adjusted, all things considered.
“It’s just one of those things that comes with the territory of being in the online space,” she said. “More eyeballs on you means more crazy people, and not everyone is totally sane on the internet.”
“But I don’t think it’s worth pulling back for just a few crazy people, because those people won’t stop anyways,” she continued.
Stalkers and slavish Twitch supporters also provide an interesting business opportunity. When I ask Siragusa if she considers herself a “businesswoman,” she demurely replies, “I guess so,” but despite her hedging, her aptitude for all she’s created is obvious, and it wraps her easily. Even her most seemingly random business ventures feel completely unsurprising once I understand what she believes in her bones—that her body, the outrage and obsession it generates, is the key to a lifetime of guaranteed agency.
So Siragusa floats, with cherry-flavored self-possession, between cam-girl ring lights and stuffed-shirt investments in order to rake cash in from the best of both worlds. She’s smart. She’s dedicated. In 10 years, she’d like to be on a ranch with her ponies, her investments healthy enough that she can “just kind of cruise” and sleep more than four hours.
But today, she’s tired—I can hear it in her voice on the phone.
She still answers my questions without hesitation. Siragusa won’t stop until it’s time. Everything she does, from obscene PornHub livestream reposts to buying 7-11’s, it’s a sacrifice at the altar of an ideal life.
“The philosophy that I’d want to have is ‘work hard, play hard,’” Siragusa told me, “but I don’t live by that. It’s not lucrative to play hard right now.”