TLDR: On January 24, 2026, rock climber Alex Honnold successfully climbed the outside of Taiwan’s Taipei 101 skyscraper – all 1,667 feet – without ropes, harnesses, or safety equipment, completing the ascent in front of 12.5 million live Netflix viewers.
He made it to the top. At 40 years old with two young daughters at home, Honnold pulled off what might be the most-watched free solo climb in history.
What “Free Solo” Actually Means
If you saw the 2018 documentary Free Solo on National Geographic, you already know who Alex Honnold is. He’s the guy who climbed a 3,000-foot granite wall in Yosemite National Park with nothing but his hands and feet.
No rope. No safety net. Just him and the rock.
One mistake meant death, and the whole world watched the documentary holding their breath even though they knew he survived – the movie wouldn’t exist otherwise.
That climb made him famous. It also made a lot of people think he was crazy. But here’s what made this new climb different, and arguably worse: this time, it happened live.
No safety buffer of watching it months after the fact. No knowing the ending before you hit play.
If Alex Honnold slipped while climbing Taipei 101, millions of people around the world would have watched him fall to his death in real-time.
Netflix bet that’s exactly what would make people tune in. And they were right – 12.5 million people watched simultaneously.
The Building Is Taller Than The Empire State Building
Taipei 101 sits in Taiwan’s capital city. At 1,667 feet tall with 101 floors, it’s one of the tallest buildings in the world. For comparison, the Empire State Building is 1,454 feet. The building was designed to look like a bamboo stalk, with eight sections that flare outward as you go up.
These overhangs create what climbers call “the crux” – the hardest moves where Honnold had to pull his body weight up and over a ledge every eight floors.
But here’s the bigger problem: rock climbing and building climbing are completely different. When you climb a mountain, every handhold is unique. The rock has cracks, bumps, rough spots your fingers can grip. You can see where you’re going and plan your route.
A skyscraper is the opposite.
It’s glass and metal, smooth and slippery. Every window looks exactly the same. There’s nowhere for your fingers to grab except the thin metal bars between windows.
Professional climbers who studied the route said it was going to be “two easy moves and one kinda hard move” repeated thousands of times for two straight hours.
That might sound boring, but the danger is in the repetition. Your brain zones out. Your forearms get tired. And if you slip even once, you’re dead.
Honnold proved them right. The climb took just under two and a half hours of this exact repetitive pattern.
He’s A 40-Year-Old Father Now
When Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan in 2017, he was single and 32 years old. He had nobody depending on him. If he died, it was his choice and his consequence.
Fast forward to 2026, and everything has changed. He’s married now. He has two young daughters at home.
And a lot of people asked the same question: what kind of father risks leaving his kids without a dad for a Netflix stunt?
Honnold’s answer was cold and calculated. He said the climb was “low risk” compared to what he’s done before.
The building has ledges every eight floors where he could rest and even re-enter the building if the weather turned bad. The handholds are bigger and easier than the tiny cracks on El Capitan.
In his mind, this was actually safer than the climb that made him famous.
And looking at the footage afterward, he was probably right. His heart rate stayed remarkably stable throughout most of the climb, only spiking when he transitioned to the communications spire near the top.
Netflix Broadcast A Potential Death Live
This is where things got uncomfortable.
Netflix has been losing subscribers and facing pressure from investors. They needed big, must-watch events to compete with traditional sports. So they gambled on something no streaming service had tried before: broadcasting a man’s potential death as entertainment.
The marketing for the event didn’t shy away from this.
The promotional materials emphasized that Honnold was older now, that he had a family, that the stakes were higher than ever. They were selling the tension. They were selling the fear.
And they knew that millions of people would tune in specifically because they wanted to see if he made it or if he fell.
To protect themselves from showing an actual death on screen, Netflix installed a 10-second broadcast delay.
If Honnold fell, the control room would cut the feed before viewers saw the impact. The screen would go black, or cut to a wide shot of the city, followed by a somber announcement.
But that’s the game, isn’t it? They sold you the possibility of watching him die while promising they wouldn’t actually show it if it happened. It was voyeuristic. It was ghoulish.
And it became one of the most-watched events Netflix has ever streamed, with 12.5 million people watching at the same time.
The Weather Held Just Long Enough
The climb happened at 9:00 AM local time in Taipei on Saturday, January 24, 2026. That timing wasn’t random. Meteorologists said that was when the humidity was manageable and the wind speeds were lowest.
Later in the day, the sun heats up the city and creates unpredictable wind patterns that could blow a climber off the building.
But here’s the tricky part: climbing smooth glass requires a specific level of humidity. Too dry, and the rubber on climbing shoes won’t stick. Too wet, and the glass becomes like ice.
The production team hired private meteorologists to monitor the conditions minute by minute. If rain started to fall or if condensation formed on the glass, the climb would have been canceled. There was no “try and see.” Once he started, he was committed.
The building itself moves in the wind. At over 1,600 feet tall, even a light breeze causes the tower to sway. Taipei 101 has a giant 660-ton pendulum suspended inside between the 87th and 92nd floors to dampen this movement, but climbers say you can still feel the building shift beneath your hands.
The conditions held. The humidity stayed in the perfect range. The winds remained calm. And Honnold completed the climb just as the sun was setting over the Taiwan Strait, creating a dramatic backdrop that Netflix’s 24 cameras captured from every angle.
The City Shut Down For This
Taipei didn’t treat this like a publicity stunt. They treated it like a major security operation. On the morning of the climb, major roads around the tower were completely closed.
Sidewalks were blocked off. The bike-share stations were shut down. All of this to create a “sterile zone” around the building.
Why? Because if Alex Honnold had fallen, he wouldn’t have been the only one at risk. A falling body from 1,000 feet up becomes a projectile. If he was carrying any gear and it came loose, it could have killed someone on the ground.
The city took no chances.
The airspace around the tower was also restricted, with only production helicopters and drones allowed. This was a massive production, with dozens of cameras positioned on the building, in helicopters, and on nearby rooftops to capture every angle of the climb.
What Happened At The Top
The hardest part of the entire climb came in the final 200 feet.
After climbing the eight bamboo-style segments of the building, Honnold had to transition to the communications spire at the very top. This narrow steel structure had no ledges, no places to rest. It was pure vertical climbing on smooth metal and glass.
This is where his heart rate finally spiked. The bio-telemetry data Netflix was broadcasting showed his pulse jump to 134 beats per minute as he navigated the spire’s seams. For context, it had been hovering around 110-115 for most of the climb.
The very last move was the most dangerous. To reach the lightning rod at the absolute peak, Honnold had to perform what climbers call a “deadpoint” – a controlled lunge where you reach for a hold at the peak of your upward momentum. The spire was too smooth for a static reach.
If his timing had been off by even a fraction of a second, if the friction hadn’t held, he would have fallen.
But the move worked. At 7:40 PM local time (after starting at 9:00 AM and climbing for about two and a half hours with breaks), Alex Honnold touched the lightning rod assembly at the very top of Taipei 101.
Twelve and a half million people watching live saw him make it.
His First Words At The Summit
After reaching the top, Honnold stood on a platform barely larger than a square meter, 1,667 feet above the streets of Taipei. Drones circled him, capturing the moment from every angle as the city lights began to glow in the twilight.
When asked how he felt, Honnold gave the most Alex Honnold answer possible: “Pretty good. The glass was a bit cleaner than expected.”
That emotional flatness is exactly what makes him so good at what he does. While 12.5 million people were holding their breath watching him climb, he was thinking about window cleanliness.
After a few minutes at the summit, he climbed back down to a maintenance hatch that had been opened for him and re-entered the building. The physical risk was over. He took an elevator down to the 101st floor balcony where Netflix conducted a post-climb interview.
Then he went home to his wife and daughters.
What The Climb Actually Accomplished
Within minutes of Honnold reaching the summit, the event became the most-watched non-scripted live broadcast in Netflix history. The hashtag #HonnoldTaipei101 trended globally for 14 hours. Netflix’s stock price jumped 2.1% the next trading day.
For Taipei, the climb was an enormous marketing win. Search volume for “Taipei 101” and “Taiwan tourism” spiked 40% globally. The building’s observatory is expected to see a 25% increase in visitors over the following months.
But beyond the numbers, the climb proved something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable: there’s a massive global audience for watching someone risk their life in real-time. Not as part of a documentary where you know they survived. Not as a movie stunt with hidden safety equipment. As a live event where the outcome was genuinely uncertain.
Netflix proved that “event television” doesn’t need to be sports or scripted entertainment. It can be one man climbing a building with nothing but his hands and feet while the whole world watches to see if he makes it or falls.
Reports say similar climbs are already being planned for the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the Shard in London.
The Question Nobody Wants To Ask
Alex Honnold made it to the top. He came home safe. His daughters still have their father. In that sense, this story has a happy ending.
But the question remains: should this have happened at all?
Not whether it was physically possible or whether Honnold had the skill to do it. Those questions were answered the moment he touched the lightning rod.
The real question is whether it’s okay to turn a man risking his life into a global streaming event. Whether it’s ethical for Netflix to broadcast someone’s potential death as entertainment, even with a 10-second delay and the ability to cut away.
Whether a 40-year-old father of two should be climbing a 1,667-foot building without safety equipment because a streaming service offered him a paycheck and the Taiwanese government gave him permission.
Twelve and a half million people tuned in to find out if he would live or die. That number alone tells you where we’ve landed as a society.
The climb is over. Alex Honnold survived. But the conversation about what we all just watched is only beginning.
