Pete Davidson Biography 2026: From Staten Island to Netflix

Last updated: November 13, 2026. By Celebamerica Editorial Staff.

Pete Davidson is 32 years old, a Staten Island comedian who joined Saturday Night Live at 20, spent eight seasons on the show, and has spent the years since building a second act as a film actor, stand-up headliner, and — since January 2026 — the host of a weekly Netflix program filmed in his own garage. His net worth is estimated between $4 million and $10 million as of November 2026, with the most recent named-source anchor at $4 million (Celebrity Net Worth, via Parade, 2026), down from a reported $8 million in 2024. And in December 2025, he became a father for the first time: his daughter, Scottie Rose Hewitt Davidson, was born on December 12, 2025.

This biography covers the whole arc — the childhood shaped by the September 11 attacks, the stand-up rooms of Staten Island, the SNL years and what they actually paid, the films, the ferry he bought with Colin Jost, the relationships that filled tabloids for a decade, the health conditions he talks about in public, and the 2026 reinvention that put him on the cover of Variety under the headline “Pete Davidson Grows Up.” Every figure below is tied to a named source, and where sources disagree, this page says so instead of picking the flattering number.

Early Life: Staten Island, Loss, and a Seven-Year-Old’s Grief

Peter Michael Davidson was born on November 16, 1993, in Staten Island, New York, the oldest child of Scott Matthew Davidson, a New York City firefighter, and Amy Waters Davidson, a school nurse. He has a younger sister, Casey. The family lived in Staten Island, the borough that would become the raw material for almost everything Davidson later wrote and performed — the accent, the attitude, the jokes about a place New Yorkers treat as a punchline.

When Pete was seven, his father was killed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Scott Davidson was last seen at the Marriott World Trade Center. He was one of 343 FDNY firefighters who died that day. Pete has talked about the loss for his entire public life, sometimes in jokes, sometimes straight. He has his father’s FDNY badge number, 8418, tattooed on his left arm. In 2025, he named his daughter Scottie after him. The through-line is not subtle: the defining fact of Pete Davidson’s childhood became the defining fact of his comedy, his films, and his name choices as a father.

After his father’s death, Davidson began acting out at school. He has said in interviews, including with The New York Times, that at one point he pulled out his own hair until he was bald. He was in and out of mental health facilities from the age of nine, a fact he discussed with Variety in 2018. School was a rough fit. He attended St. Joseph by-the-Sea High School and Tottenville High School in Staten Island, then Xaverian High School in Brooklyn. None of them held him for long in the conventional sense. What held him was a microphone.

First Jokes: Stand-Up at Sixteen and the Road to New York

Davidson tried stand-up for the first time at 16, at a Staten Island bowling alley. The material was already personal: his father, his neighborhood, his own head. He kept at it through his teens, working the small rooms and open mics while New York’s comedy scene sized him up. Early television spots followed — MTV’s Guy Code, Wild ’N Out, and a small role on Brooklyn Nine-Nine in 2013. He was tall, skinny, heavy-lidded, and funny in a way that read as both unbothered and wound up at the same time. Casting directors noticed. So did Saturday Night Live.

The audition came in 2014. Davidson was 20 years old, one of the youngest cast members in the show’s history. He joined for season 40, which premiered in the fall of 2014, and stayed for eight seasons. For a kid who had started telling jokes in a bowling alley at 16, the distance between Staten Island and Studio 8H had closed in about four years. The pay, as he later revealed, had not closed nearly as fast.

Saturday Night Live: Eight Seasons, Small Paychecks, Big Stage

Davidson’s SNL run lasted from 2014 to 2022, and it made him famous in a way stand-up alone never could have. He was a fixture on “Weekend Update,” where his bits about his own life — his father, his mental health, his dating life — became a signature. He played Chad, the unbothered guy who was fine with everything, in a recurring sketch that became a fan favorite. He impersonated no one famous with any great conviction and did not need to: the show used him as himself, a lanky Staten Island kid reacting to the news of the week.

The money, by Hollywood standards, was modest for most of that run. In a December 2024 interview with New York Magazine, Davidson said his first-year pay was “like three grand an episode,” and that his first paycheck basically bought him dinner. Celebrity Net Worth’s June 2026 breakdown of SNL pay puts the scale in context: first-year cast members earn about $3,000 per episode, second- and third-year players about $4,000, fourth-year players about $7,000, and fifth-year-and-up players about $15,000, with a top tier of $25,000 per episode reserved for a handful of stars. On a 21-episode season, Davidson’s first year worked out to roughly $63,000 before tax. By his later seasons, at the $15,000-per-episode band, a full season would have paid around $315,000. Even so, SNL was never where his real money came from. It was the platform that made everything else possible — and, as Kenan Thompson put it to Variety when Davidson’s pay comments circulated, “it’s more so about having the job than getting paid for the job.”

Davidson announced his departure in May 2022, at the end of season 47. His final episode aired on May 21, 2022. He left with the show’s blessing and a film career already underway, plus a semi-autobiographical movie that had turned his life into a box-office story two years earlier.

Beyond SNL: The King of Staten Island, Bupkis, and the Big Screen

The film that matters most in Davidson’s story is The King of Staten Island (2020), which he co-wrote with director Judd Apatow and Dave Sirus. Davidson plays Scott Carlin, a 24-year-old Staten Island slacker still living with his mother, whose firefighter father died when he was seven. The plot is fiction; the wound is not. The film earned respectful reviews and gave Davidson something SNL never had: a lead role built out of his own life, on his own terms.

He followed it with a run of film work that mixed comedies, dramas, and voice roles: The Suicide Squad (2021) as Blackguard, Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), Meet Cute (2022), Good Mourning (2022), which he co-directed, Dumb Money (2023), and the voice of Mirage in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023). In 2025 he starred opposite Eddie Murphy in The Pickup. His television comeback vehicle was Bupkis, a semi-autobiographical Peacock series that ran for one season in 2023 and reportedly paid him around $500,000 per episode, according to FandomWire — a figure that should be treated as reported, not confirmed, since Peacock and Davidson have never published his fee.

2026 brought two more films. In August, he appeared in Will Gluck’s romantic comedy One Night Only, a Universal release that struggled at the box office. And on November 13, 2026 — the week this biography was published — Amazon MGM releases David Leitch’s heist comedy How to Rob a Bank, in which Davidson plays Vince alongside Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai, and John C. Reilly. At the film’s New York premiere in November 2026, Davidson spoke at length about his tattoo removal, the subject of the next decade of his life and a six-figure bill he is still paying.

The Pete Davidson Show: A Garage, a Microphone, and Netflix

In January 2026, Davidson began a weekly program on Netflix called The Pete Davidson Show. It premiered on January 30, 2026, as one of Netflix’s first two original video podcasts — the platform’s first move into a format YouTube had owned for years. The setup is deliberately unpolished: Davidson sits in his garage with famous friends and talks. The first guest was Machine Gun Kelly, followed by Charlamagne Tha God. New episodes drop weekly, and the show is available only to U.S. audiences on Netflix, not on audio podcast platforms.

The show matters for two reasons. First, it is Davidson’s first solo hosting vehicle, a format that fits him better than sketch or scripted television: loose, conversational, and built around his own voice rather than a character. Second, it is the clearest sign of his 2026 reinvention. Variety put him on its cover in September 2026 under the headline “Pete Davidson Grows Up,” a piece that addressed his SNL exit, his famous exes, fatherhood, and the Hillary Clinton tattoo he has decided to keep. The same month, he spoke to Charlamagne Tha God for Interview Magazine about parenthood, calling his daughter a blessing and saying he did not want to mess fatherhood up. In 2026, the Webby Awards honored him with a Special Achievement Award, citing his January Netflix launch and his standing as one of the defining performers of his generation.

The Money: Income Streams, the Ferry, and the Net Worth Range

Pete Davidson’s net worth is a good example of why this site reports ranges instead of single numbers. The estimates disagree, and the disagreement itself tells a story. Parade, reporting in 2026 and citing Celebrity Net Worth, puts his net worth at $4 million, and notes that it is down from a reported $8 million in 2024. Scintillating Stars, updated in November 2026, lists $6 million. Writeminer’s October 2026 update gives a range of $8 million to $10 million, and several profile pages still list $8 million flat. The honest range, on the sources above, is $4 million to $10 million, with the most recent named-source anchor at $4 million (Celebrity Net Worth, via Parade, 2026).

Why would the number fall by half in two years? Nobody outside Davidson’s own accounts knows for certain, and Parade is careful to say so. The visible pressures are real enough: he bought a retired ferry in 2021, has been to rehab several times, and spent a reported $200,000 on tattoo removal since 2020. In May 2026, the International Business Times reported that he had sold his Staten Island condo at an estimated $400,000 loss. None of that proves a $4 million drop on its own — celebrity wealth trackers also revise their methods, and a single big-ticket purchase can move an estimate more than it moves a bank balance. But the direction of travel is consistent across the newest reporting: the 2026 figure is lower than the 2024 figure. For the full net-worth breakdown — the SNL pay bands, the film fees, and how the estimate moved over time — see Pete Davidson net worth on our sister site GuideNetWorth, which covers the money angle in depth.

His income streams are easier to pin down than the total. Stand-up touring is the steadiest earner: Davidson headlines theaters and clubs across the United States, and live comedy pays on the night, without a studio taking a cut. Acting fees come next — film roles, voice work, and the Peacock series Bupkis, for which he was reportedly paid around $500,000 per episode. The Netflix show adds a third stream: a weekly program on the world’s largest streamer, with the kind of deal that typically includes a fee plus the exposure that sells tour tickets. Endorsements fill out the picture. Parade’s 2026 net worth report lists Taco Bell, Manscaped, Smartwater, Totino’s, and Hellmann’s among the brands he has appeared for, including Super Bowl commercials. None of those deals have published fees, so none of them can be added to a total with any honesty — but together, they explain how a comedian whose SNL paychecks started at $3,000 an episode built a multi-million-dollar career.

Net Worth Over Time: How the Estimate Moved

The table below tracks the milestones that moved Davidson’s money, with the figure attached to each one and the source that reported it. It is a timeline of events, not a bank statement — no tracker has access to his accounts, and any site that prints a year-by-year net worth without sources is guessing.

Real Estate, the Ferry, and Big Purchases

Davidson’s best-known purchase is also his strangest. In January 2022, he and fellow SNL cast member Colin Jost bought the decommissioned Staten Island Ferry John F. Kennedy at auction for $280,100. Davidson has said they bought it while “very stoned,” and the purchase became a running joke — then a real project. The ferry has hosted events, including Tommy Hilfiger’s New York Fashion Week show in 2025. In September 2026, Davidson and Jost staged a free comedy show on the vessel with Snapple, rebranding it for the night as the Snapple Island Ferry and billing it as a floating comedy club. Whether the ferry ever turns a profit is an open question; as a purchase, it is the most Pete Davidson thing he has ever bought — a piece of Staten Island, bought with a friend, turned into a stage.

His housing history is more conventional and, lately, more costly. In 2021 he bought a Staten Island condominium reported at $1.2 million. In May 2026, the International Business Times reported that he had sold the condo at an estimated $400,000 loss, shortly after news of his breakup with Elsie Hewitt surfaced. The same reporting noted that the family home upstate — where Hewitt’s Instagram photos showed the couple welcoming their newborn in December 2025 — was where Scottie spent her first weeks. No property records have been published that would let anyone verify the sale price independently, so the loss figure should be read as reported, not confirmed.

The other big-ticket item in Davidson’s life is not a property at all. It is the removal of roughly 200 tattoos, a process he began in 2020 and has described as “horrible” on The Tonight Show: each tattoo needs 10 to 12 laser sessions, with six to eight weeks of healing between them, and the skin cannot see sunlight while it heals. A source close to Davidson told People in early 2025 that he had spent approximately $200,000 on removal so far. At the New York premiere of How to Rob a Bank in November 2026, he said his arms, hands, and neck were largely clear, but his torso and back still needed work — and that finishing could take another 10 years and a considerable amount of money. He has said he will keep two or three tattoos, including the one for his father and the Hillary Clinton tattoo that Variety noted in its September 2026 cover story. In April 2026, he appeared at CinemaCon with a small new tattoo reading “Scottie” between his beard and ear.

Personal Life: Relationships, Fatherhood, and Co-Parenting

Davidson’s dating life has been tabloid fuel for a decade, and he has never been shy about it — his relationships have been material for his stand-up and his “Weekend Update” bits alike. The names are well documented: Cazzie David (2016–2018); Ariana Grande, to whom he was briefly engaged in the summer of 2018; Kate Beckinsale, Margaret Qualley, and Kaia Gerber in 2019; Phoebe Dynevor in 2021; Kim Kardashian from November 2021 to August 2022; Chase Sui Wonders in 2022–2023; and Madelyn Cline in 2023–2024. He has never married.

The relationship that changed his life began in 2025. Davidson and British model and actress Elsie Hewitt went public in March 2025, and on July 16, 2025, they announced on Instagram that they were expecting their first child together. Their daughter, Scottie Rose Hewitt Davidson, was born on December 12, 2025, at a New York City hospital, and the couple announced the birth on Instagram on December 18, sharing photos in which the baby’s face was kept private. The name is a tribute on both sides: Scottie for Davidson’s late father, Scott, and Rose for Hewitt’s middle name.

Five months later, the couple split. People and other outlets reported the breakup in May 2026, and the International Business Times reported that Hewitt had posted on TikTok and Instagram about raising five-month-old Scottie largely on her own, describing the exhaustion of solo parenting. Davidson has not publicly addressed those claims. In July 2026, the pair reached a co-parenting agreement, telling Page Six in a joint statement: “We are cooperatively co-parenting our daughter whose well-being remains our top priority, and we are fully committed to working together to give her love from both of us.” On November 1, 2026, they reunited in public to celebrate Scottie’s first Halloween, dressing in Sopranos-themed costumes — Pete as Paulie, Scottie as Tony — and Hewitt shared the family photos on Instagram. For a fuller picture of his physical stats alongside the personal story, see our Pete Davidson height profile, which covers the same 2025–2026 period.

Fatherhood has changed the way Davidson talks about himself. Speaking to Charlamagne Tha God for Interview Magazine’s September 2026 issue, he called his daughter a blessing and said he did not want to mess this up. It is the same sentiment Hewitt expressed in her birth announcement — “My best work yet” — and it is the note his 2026 press has struck again and again: the comic who made his name joking about his own damage is now, at 32, trying to build something steadier.

Health in the Open: Crohn’s, BPD, and Tattoo Removal

Few celebrities have talked about their health as plainly as Pete Davidson. He revealed his Crohn’s disease diagnosis in 2016: an autoimmune condition that inflames parts of the digestive system, causes severe abdominal pain, and has no cure. He has said he uses medical marijuana to help manage it, and has spoken about infusions every six weeks. In 2017, at 23, he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and post-traumatic stress disorder, after an earlier misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder and years of intense mood episodes he did not understand. He announced the BPD diagnosis himself, in a “Weekend Update” segment, telling viewers who thought they might be depressed to see a doctor — and then, in characteristically Davidson fashion, joking that joining the cast of a late-night show might help too. Us Weekly covered the diagnosis in September 2017, quoting his line that he was “depressed all the time” and that the diagnosis finally explained what he had been living with.

He has been in and out of inpatient treatment facilities since he was nine, a history he discussed with Variety in 2018, and has been to rehab several times as an adult, including stints connected to his mental health and addiction struggles. He has spoken about self-harm in his teens, and about starting to get tattoos to cover the scars. None of this is presented here as gossip: Davidson himself made it public, repeatedly, and has said he did so in the hope that it would help kids who felt the way he did. It is part of why his audience trusts him — and part of why the tattoo removal matters to him. The tattoos, he has said, remind him of a younger, more troubled version of himself. Removing them is, in his own telling, a way of growing up in public.

Headlines and Hard Moments

Davidson’s candor has cut both ways. In December 2018, weeks after his split from Ariana Grande, he posted on Instagram that he did not want to be on this earth anymore. The post prompted a welfare check by the New York Police Department and a wave of public concern from fans and fellow comedians; he performed on Saturday Night Live that same night. He later said the post reflected a real crisis, and his openness about it became part of the reason his BPD disclosure landed the way it did.

In 2022, his relationship with Kim Kardashian drew him into a public feud with her ex-husband, Kanye West, who targeted Davidson in social media posts and in a music video. Davidson mostly stayed quiet, and the episode faded when the relationship ended in August 2022. The same year, he left SNL — a professional high point that arrived alongside a personal low point in the tabloids, and the combination is part of why the post-SNL years looked, from the outside, like a drift: films, a short-lived series, and a lot of headlines about who he was dating. The 2026 picture is different: a weekly Netflix show, a film opening the week this page was published, and a daughter whose first Halloween he spent with her mother. The drift, if that is what it was, seems to have ended.

How He Compares: Fellow SNL Comics and Stand-Up Peers

Davidson’s career looks different next to the comedians he is usually grouped with. He is not a stadium act like Kevin Hart and not a prestige auteur like Dave Chappelle. He is an SNL-bred performer whose fame came early, whose pay stayed modest for years, and whose second act is being built on streaming rather than on the road. The comparison is useful because it shows how unusual his path is: most SNL comics either stay in sketch and sitcoms or pivot to film franchises. Davidson did a little of both, then bet on himself as a host.

Readers who want the same treatment for his peers can find full biographies on this site. Kevin Hart’s biography covers a stand-up career built into a touring and production empire. Dave Chappelle’s biography traces a different kind of post-sketch path — walking away from a hit show and rebuilding on his own terms. Adam Sandler’s net worth profile covers the SNL-to-film arc Davidson’s early career was often compared to, and Bill Burr’s net worth profile covers a stand-up lifer who built his fortune the slow way, on the road. For more profiles in this lane, browse our biography category.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Reporting

Net worth and pay: Parade (“Pete Davidson Net Worth (2026),” citing Celebrity Net Worth, $4 million in 2026, down from $8 million in 2024; SNL pay bands and endorsement brands); Celebrity Net Worth (SNL pay scale, June 2026; Pete Davidson net worth); Writeminer (October 2026 update, $8–10 million range); Scintillating Stars (November 2026, $6 million). Career and biography: Wikipedia (Pete Davidson career timeline; The Pete Davidson Show, January 2026); Variety (September 2026 cover, “Pete Davidson Grows Up”; Kenan Thompson on SNL pay); Netflix (The Pete Davidson Show announcement, January 2026). Family and fatherhood: Parade (birth announcement, December 18, 2025); People (pregnancy announcement July 2025; split and co-parenting reports, 2026); Just Jared (Halloween reunion, November 1, 2026); International Business Times (May 2026 co-parenting claims and condo sale report). Health: Us Weekly (BPD diagnosis, September 2017); People (Crohn’s disease; tattoo removal cost, February 2025). Tattoo removal: LADbible (February 2025, $200,000 spent); Indulge Express (November 12, 2026, 30 percent done, 10 more years).

How we estimated: Pete Davidson has never published his finances, so every net worth figure on this page is an estimate from named sources, not a disclosed fact. Where sources disagreed — $4 million (Celebrity Net Worth via Parade, 2026), $6 million (Scintillating Stars, November 2026), $8–10 million (Writeminer, October 2026) — we published the full range and anchored it to the most recent named source. Salary figures come from Davidson’s own words (New York Magazine, December 2024) and Celebrity Net Worth’s SNL pay-scale reporting (June 2026). Figures tied to a single unconfirmed report, such as the Bupkis episode fee and the condo sale loss, are labeled as reported. Estimates may differ from private reality because of taxes, fees, debts, and spending that no public source can see.