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A Tribute To Grant From Fellow Creators

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A decade of weekend science experiments ended in silence, and the creators he inspired refused to let that silence stand.

On August 8, 2019, TKOR — the DIY science channel Jonathan “Grant” Thompson built from scratch — released “A Tribute To Grant From Fellow Creators,” a compilation of reflections from across the YouTube maker community following Thompson’s sudden death. The video arrived just over a week after Thompson, 38, died in a paramotoring accident in southern Utah, and it doubles as both a farewell and an active fundraiser.

• Jonathan Grant Thompson, 38, died the evening of July 29, 2019, in a paramotoring/paragliding accident near Honeymoon Trail in Hurricane, Washington County, Utah, after failing to return from a flight; his body and equipment were located using an onboard GPS locator.
• Thompson built TKOR into a channel with more than 11 million subscribers and billions of views over roughly a decade of DIY projects, weekend experiments, and science demonstrations.
• The tribute video functions as a fundraiser for the Grant Thompson Memorial Outward Bound Scholarship, which had already raised tens of thousands of dollars in the days following his death.

A Decade Building TKOR

Thompson launched The King of Random with the kind of premise that sounds simple until you actually try it: take a household item, a weekend, and a healthy disregard for whether something is “supposed” to work, then film the result. Over roughly ten years that formula turned into one of YouTube’s biggest science and DIY channels, pulling in more than 11 million subscribers and racking up billions of views on projects ranging from backyard chemistry to survival hacks.

What set TKOR apart from other how-to channels wasn’t just the volume of content — it was Thompson’s own visible curiosity on camera. He wasn’t performing expertise; he was genuinely testing an idea in real time, and viewers came along for whichever direction it went, successful or not.

The Accident in Hurricane, Utah

Thompson died the evening of July 29, 2019, in a paramotoring accident near Honeymoon Trail in Hurricane, a small city in Washington County in southern Utah. When he failed to return from the flight, search efforts turned to the GPS locator on his equipment, which led crews to his location. His body and his paramotoring gear were recovered at the site.

Creators Rally to Honor Grant

“A Tribute To Grant From Fellow Creators” gathers personal stories from other YouTube makers who crossed paths with Thompson — collaborators, peers, and creators he’d mentored or helped along the way. The through-line in their reflections is consistent: Thompson’s enthusiasm for a new idea was contagious, and he was generous with his time and knowledge toward channels far smaller than his own.

His boundless curiosity and infectious enthusiasm didn’t just build TKOR — it’s what other creators kept coming back to talk about once he was gone.

That generosity is a big part of why the tribute spread the way it did across the maker community. Thompson’s death prompted an outpouring of tributes from fans and fellow creators on social media, the kind of response that reflected just how many channels he’d touched directly rather than just influenced from a distance.

The Outward Bound Scholarship

Rather than close the video on grief alone, TKOR built it around the Grant Thompson Memorial Outward Bound Scholarship, a fund supporting wilderness education and outdoor discovery programs — a direct nod to Thompson’s own love of exploration and self-reliance, the same instincts that drew him to paramotoring in the first place. As of early August 2019, the fund had already collected tens of thousands of dollars from fans and fellow creators.

The scholarship’s framing matters here: it isn’t a generic memorial fund, it’s tied specifically to the kind of outdoor, hands-on learning Thompson built his entire career around. For a channel whose whole identity was “go try it yourself,” funding kids to go do exactly that in the wilderness is about as on-brand a tribute as TKOR could have built.