Influencer Brandon Edelman, a.k.a. Bran Flakezz, has been transparent about his finances, but is not willing to disclose one specific aspect of his wealth.
“Honestly, the only thing I wouldn’t share with my followers is how much a specific brand partnership paid me,” Edelman told People in an interview published on Thursday, April 2. “That would definitely go against code!”
Edelman noted that there’s “so much red tape around salary transparency in both the content creation world and corporate world.”
“I feel it just doesn’t benefit anyone except for the large executives of these big box brands,” he said, noting that pay transparency would make people able to better negotiate their salaries and have “better pay for all of us.”
“I think sharing my salary is something that sets me apart from so many other creators and helps build trust with my community,” he continued.
Edelman got candid about his finances during a 2025 episode of the “Trading Secrets” podcast, sharing that he made $768,000 in brand deals the previous year. He went on to explain that he had been “trending up” to about $5,000 per month on the TikTok creator fund.
“What people don’t realize about TikTok is I just get money from the creator fund. I see creators that really use TikTok Shop and they’re making like $10,000 to $15,000 a month on TikTok Shop, which is crazy,” he claimed, adding that the majority of his income is brand partnerships. “I’m not a product pusher. I’m not a linker. Do I do it here and there? Absolutely. But that’s never going to be the bread and butter of my business. I’m more entertainment, comedy-focused.”
Edelman said at the time that he was toying around with the idea of hiring an assistant, which he thinks would be an investment that could benefit him in the long haul.
“I’m at the point of my career now where I’m like, ‘OK, but do I need to put $70,000 of that towards an assistant who can help me then post on threads, post on Snapchat? And then I’m paying her $70,000 but what if she’s able to make me a few $100,000 off of other platforms that I’m too spread thin right now to manage?” he said.
He continued, “So those are more of the conversations I’m having now as a business person. It’s like, ‘OK, how do I sustain the business?’ Always the most important thing. How do I sustain? How do I grow? And how can we get creative with growth because now the following is there. It’s great. Of course I always want to grow my platform, but I’m very happy with my platform size. Now it’s like how do I actually grow that dollar amount? And it’s having those conversations of, do I invest in this, do I invest in that? So I think that’s kind of the interesting part of it all.”
