The internet’s original influencers had claws
Before a pet account needed a ring light, a content calendar, and an alarming number of affiliate links, cats had already worked out the internet’s favorite trick: give people one tiny, perfect thing to share. A cat in a box. A cat with a terminally skeptical face. A cat who happens to be exceptionally long.
The most famous cats on the internet are a history of platforms as much as pets, running from VHS tape and early imageboards through Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and Instagram. A few skipped the internet entirely and got government jobs.
One warning about every other internet famous cats list you will read: they copy each other. Longcat is routinely called male. Tombili is credited with going viral four years later than he did. Colonel Meow’s record-setting fur gets rounded off. Every cat below is a real, identifiable animal, checked against a primary source — a record, an award, a statue, a national newspaper — and each entry links to the source it came from. The memes who don’t come with a reliable biography get their own note near the end.
1. Fatso, the original Keyboard Cat
Charlie Schmidt, a Spokane performance artist, filmed his orange tabby appearing to play a tiny keyboard in 1984, mostly out of boredom, with his own hands hidden up the sleeves of an infant’s T-shirt. Fatso died in 1987 — two decades before Schmidt digitized the tape and uploaded it on June 7, 2007.
It sat there until 2009, when Brad O’Farrell got permission to staple it onto the end of a blooper video, vaudeville-hook style. The original Keyboard Cat clip became reusable comedy software: see a bad moment, deploy cat, move on. Within months there were hundreds, plus an MTV Movie Awards gag and a Weezer tour bit.
The twenty-year gap between Fatso’s life and his fame is the whole story. He was never an influencer with a management team. He was a cat in a weird home video that outlived him by decades.
2. Longcat, the cat the internet called Nobiko
Miko rescued a thin gray street cat in Japan in 2002. She grew up white, fluffy, deaf, and — the detail that mattered — roughly 65 centimeters from head to toe.
A photo of her held upright with her paws outstretched reached Japan’s Futaba Channel around 2005, then crossed to 4chan. Nobody asked for context. They stretched her, drew her, and invented “Catnarok,” a mock-apocalyptic war against a color-inverted nemesis, because early imageboard culture treated one photo like the opening chapter of a cinematic universe.
Her real name was Shiro, and the cat the internet knew as Longcat died on September 20, 2020, at 18, after a period of ill health; her owner never made a cause public. What she proved is that an image needs no polish, no dialogue, and no punch line if the premise is instantly legible. One tall cat, infinite vertical scroll.
3. Shironeko, the original zen cat
Long before cozy content became a category with an ambient playlist, Shironeko had it locked down. From 2006 his owner posted photos of a white cat, born to a farming family in Iwate Prefecture, with a permanently sleepy expression and a remarkable willingness to sit still while baskets, flowers, and leaves were balanced on his head.
The photos had the calm of a desktop wallpaper that somehow also had better comic timing than most of the internet. He was enormous in Japan and enormous again in China, where the death of the zen cat made the national news.
Shironeko died on March 2, 2020, at 17 — six days short of his eighteenth birthday. No medical cause was given, so his story ends there.
4. Sockington, Twitter’s feline correspondent
Jason Scott, the computer historian behind Textfiles.com, found Sockington as a stray outside a Boston subway station in 2004 and started posting in the cat’s voice in 2007. Breakfast, naps, household noises, perceived injustices — all of it filed as dispatches from a tiny, dramatic roommate, in shouty all-caps, fed out through a shell script.
Twitter added him to its recommended feeds in February 2009 and he peaked above 1.5 million followers, briefly a top-100 account with a bigger audience than Tom Cruise.
Sockington the cat died on July 18, 2022, at 18. Scott had been open about the decline — organ problems, a heart murmur, a kidney issue the cat’s own account joked about five days before the end. He asked mourners to adopt a shelter cat and name it Sockington. The account’s last update read: I CAUGHT THE RED DOT.
5. Nora, the piano cat
Nora was a gray tabby rescued from the streets of Camden, New Jersey, in 2004, who lived with two artists in Philadelphia and started sitting at the piano when students left it. She did not play well. She played earnestly, with both front paws, usually while a human was trying to practice something else.
The 2007 video went viral in the pre-viral sense, landing her on the Today Show, Conan O’Brien, and Animal Planet, and winning her the ASPCA’s Cat of the Year in 2009. That same year a Lithuanian composer premiered “CATcerto,” a chamber orchestra piece built around her recorded playing, with Nora as on-screen soloist. It has been performed around two dozen times.
Nora the piano cat died on February 5, 2024, at 19, after years of treatment for kidney disease. She belongs here as a corrective: in the same era that gave us a cat whose paws were being worked from off-camera, there was a cat who was — unhelpfully, and entirely of her own accord — actually playing.
6. Maru, the box-diving legend
The private Japanese creator known as mugumogu began posting Maru’s life to a blog in 2007 and to YouTube in 2008. Maru’s great invention was not a special effect. It was the recurring, deeply satisfying urge to enter a box, including boxes that were far too small or angled in ways that made success look statistically improbable. The videos crossed languages with no translation tax at all.
Guinness World Records certified Maru the most-viewed animal on YouTube in September 2016, a title a dog named Maymo took off him in 2018. His videos have now been watched more than 582 million times.
Maru died on September 6, 2025, at 18, following a diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma. He proved a pet channel could be a durable library rather than a one-hit clip. A cat, a box, a camera, repeat.
7. Henri, le Chat Noir, the cat who made it art
A tuxedo cat named Henry starred in a series of black-and-white shorts by Seattle filmmaker Will Braden, monologuing in French subtitles about the crushing tedium of existence and the profound idiocy of the white cat he lived with. It was a parody of art films that was also, annoyingly, a genuinely good art film.
Henri, le Chat Noir won the Golden Kitty at the 2012 Internet Cat Video Festival for “Paw de Deux,” and Roger Ebert called it the best internet cat video ever made — not a sentence anyone expected from a Pulitzer-winning film critic. Braden’s own view of Henry was that he was a good-natured, happy cat who never suffered a single existential crisis in his life.
Henry died in December 2020 at 17. He is the strongest argument here that a cat video can be made rather than merely captured.
8. Lil BUB, the tiny cat with a very big legacy
Mike Bridavsky took in Lil BUB in 2011 — the runt of a feral litter born in Indiana, with an extreme form of dwarfism that kept her kitten-sized, gave her extra toes, and left her tongue permanently out. Scientists later crowdfunded a sequencing of her genome and found a mutation shared with exactly one mouse and fifteen humans.
Look at that cute tongue. It’s crying out for a smart water fountain.
She could easily have been a face to repost. Instead her Tumblr, her Tribeca documentary, and her shelter tours turned into infrastructure: Lil BUB’s Big FUND for the ASPCA has now distributed more than $427,000 across 254 grants, aimed squarely at animals that are hard to adopt.
Lil BUB died on December 1, 2019, from an aggressive bone infection. Cute got people through the door. The grants are why she still matters.
9. Nala Cat, the Instagram record holder
Varisiri Methachittiphan, known publicly as Pookie, adopted Nala as a five-month-old kitten from a shelter in Los Angeles County. The Siamese-tabby mix’s rise had nothing to do with a meme template — it was the Instagram version of stardom: a long-running visual channel, a recognizable face, and an audience that keeps coming back because the cat’s world feels consistent.
On May 13, 2020, Guinness World Records verified 4,361,519 followers for @nala_cat, then the record for the most Instagram followers for a cat.
In a list full of chaotic imageboards and accidental uploads, Nala is the clean example of what Instagram famous cats become when the audience is built over years rather than in one afternoon.
10. Tardar Sauce, forever Grumpy Cat
Tabatha Bundesen’s cat became Grumpy Cat after Tabatha’s brother Bryan posted a photo to Reddit on September 22, 2012. The frown was real — an underbite plus feline dwarfism — and almost absurdly adaptable. It worked as a reaction image, a caption format, a Lifetime Christmas movie, eight registered trademarks, and a coffee lawsuit her company won.
That flexibility is the dream of every platform product manager, except this one had whiskers and looked profoundly disappointed by the meeting.
Tardar Sauce died at home in Arizona on May 14, 2019, from complications of a urinary tract infection, in Tabatha’s arms. She gets discussed as a commercial artifact, which undersells it. She was a real pet first, and her family kept her life at the center even as the meme got enormous.
11. Colonel Meow, chief executive of fluff
Colonel Meow looked like a cat who would decline a calendar invite without opening it. Anne Marie Avey and Eric Rosario adopted the Himalayan-Persian cross at a Petco adoption event in October 2011, after he was rescued through Seattle Persian and Himalayan Rescue.
When he went viral in late 2012, the enormous coat and the majestic scowl spawned an elaborate world of “minions,” exaggerated authority, and the hashtag #spreadthefrown. In September 2013 Guinness World Records measured the longest fur on a cat at 22.87 centimeters — nine inches exactly — and he was the first cat ever to hold the title. We bet his owner had a really great pet vacuum.
He died on January 29, 2014, at two. He had been hospitalized for heart problems that November, but no cause was ever published, and that blank should stay blank. What lasted was the participation: fans didn’t just repost a striking photo, they joined a bit and extended it.
12. Tombili, Istanbul’s neighborhood celebrity
Tombili was not a managed pet account. He was a well-known street cat in the Ziverbey neighborhood of Kadıköy, a local character with the kind of reputation most of us could only earn through years of excellent porch behavior.
The photograph — Tombili reclining against a curb, propped on one elbow, in an almost painfully human pose — surfaced online in 2012 and spent years circulating through 9GAG and photoshop contests as Chill Cat. He looks like a man waiting for someone to finish a story he has already heard three times.
The Istanbul cat Tombili died on August 1, 2016, after a month-long illness, announced by a notice hung on a tree in his street. We hope he is lounging on a comfy cat bed in heaven. His neighborhood got up a petition, and that October the district unveiled a bronze statue of him in that exact pose, on the spot where the photo was taken. Somebody stole the Tombili statue a month later. The outcry was immediate and it was back within two days.
13. Smudge, the table-side skeptic
Miranda Stillabower of Ottawa posted a photo of her cat on Tumblr in June 2018, captioned to the effect that he did not care for vegetables. In May 2019 someone paired it with a screenshot of a distraught woman from an American reality show, and Woman Yelling at a Cat became one of the defining reaction formats of its era.
It works because Smudge does not look angry. He looks deeply, permanently unconvinced — the exact expression of a cat presented with a bowl containing something new and filing it as a management failure. We bet Smudge might have benefited from an automatic cat feeder.
The construction is why it lasted. Smudge had no relationship to the woman in the other panel, and that gap let people map any argument they liked onto the same exchange.
14. Tama, station master
In January 2007 a calico living at Kishi Station in Wakayama, Japan, was formally appointed station master of a rural line that was close to closing. She wore a small cap. She was paid in cat food.
Tourists came anyway, from everywhere, and the local economy gained an estimated ¥1.1 billion thanks to Tama the station master) — a phenomenon Japanese economists actually named “nekonomics.” The railway leaned in properly: a Tama-themed train, a station rebuilt in the shape of a cat’s face, and a promotion to Super Station Master.
Tama died on June 22, 2015, at 16. Around 3,000 people attended her Shinto funeral and she was enshrined as a goddess, a career arc no influencer strategy deck has ever successfully modeled. Her successors are still on duty; Yontama took the post this January.
15. Larry, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office
Larry arrived at 10 Downing Street from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in February 2011 with an actual job title, hired after viewers spotted rats scurrying behind reporters during live broadcasts. He marked fifteen years as Chief Mouser this February at the age of 19, and has now outlasted six prime ministers — a run of institutional stability the building itself has not managed.
His record as a mouser is politely described as mixed, though his minders say he was still catching them last year. His record as a broadcaster is spotless: he has upstaged more live political coverage than any animal in history, largely by sitting in a doorway during a national crisis looking entirely unbothered while a reporter tries to finish a sentence.
Nobody built Larry an audience. He stands in the most photographed doorway in Britain, and the internet does the rest.
16. Bob, the street cat who wrote a book
James Bowen was a busker recovering from addiction when he found an injured ginger tom in a London hallway in 2007. Bob started riding on his shoulders through Covent Garden, which is the sort of thing people photograph.
The book that followed, A Street Cat Named Bob), sold more than a million copies in the UK, was translated into 30 languages, and produced two feature films in which Bob largely played himself — a casting decision no other cat on this list ever earned.
Bob was killed by a car in June 2020, somewhere between 14 and 16 years old. There is a memorial to him in Islington. His fame is the least algorithmic here, and the only one that changed a person’s life first and the internet’s second.
17. Choupette, the luxury outlier
Karl Lagerfeld looked after his friend Baptiste Giabiconi’s Birman over Christmas 2011 and, by his own cheerful admission, simply never gave her back. Choupette then acquired two personal maids, a bodyguard, an iPad, and a diary kept on her behalf. In 2014 alone she reportedly earned around €3 million from a Japanese cosmetics line and a German car campaign.
Lagerfeld died in 2019. Choupette is still going at 14, and still turns up in fashion coverage — most memorably as the inspiration for a full-body costume at the 2023 Met Gala. Does your cat have more kitty outfits than Choupette? If not, the cat clothing aisle is right there.
She is the purest expression of a specific internet-cat truth: the fame does not require the cat to do anything. Maru had to get in the box. Nora had to hit the keys. Choupette’s entire body of work is existing expensively near a famous designer, and it was more than enough.
The cat memes worth mentioning, but not pretending are biographies
Some of the biggest cat memes can’t be handled responsibly as animal profiles. Happy Cat, the face of the I Can Has Cheezburger era, has conflicting identity accounts. Ceiling Cat began with a real photograph, but no reliable owner record survives.
Then there are the created characters. Nyan Cat is an animation — though it was inspired by a real Russian Blue named Marty, who belonged to the artist Chris Torres and died of feline infectious peritonitis in 2012, at two. Bongo Cat is a drawing. Pop Cat’s enormous open mouth is a digital edit of a real cat called Oatmeal. Pusheen is an illustration with a licensing business.
Keeping the buckets separate doesn’t make the internet less fun. It makes the real cats more visible, and spares everyone the cursed job of assigning a cartoon an owner, a vet record, and a LinkedIn profile.
So could your cat actually be next?
Look at what these seventeen share and it isn’t a posting cadence. It’s one legible thing: a face, a shape, a job title, a habit. Maru had boxes. Larry has a doorway. Grumpy Cat had a jaw. Tama had a hat and a train station. Whatever your cat already does relentlessly and slightly ridiculously is the raw material, which is why learning how to take photos of your cat will move the needle further than anything you can buy.
Then again, half these cats got famous by accident, on bad cameras, years before anyone was trying. The cameras got better and the pet technology got smarter, but a good cat moment remains brutally efficient content. If nothing else, you now have seventeen strong candidates for geeky cat names.
Somewhere, right now, a cat is sitting in a box and absolutely winning the platform war.
