Jimmy Donaldson, whose YouTube channel reportedly earned $82 million in 2023. Photo: MrBeast/YouTube
In January 2024, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had one thing in common – they both wanted MrBeast. Since December, Musk has been begging the 25-year-old YouTuber to post a video on X. Bezos, on the other hand, has gone old school: Last week, Amazon Prime Video reportedly offered the North Carolina creator $100 million to make a TV show. .
If this sounds like an impressive achievement by Jimmy Donaldson, real name MrBeast, it's not even close. According to Forbes, the college dropout earned $82 million in 2023, mostly from his stunt videos on YouTube. Indeed, as of last May, he is the most popular YouTuber in the world with 234 million subscribers.
And that's why, according to Ryan Broderick of the tech newsletter Garbage Day, Musk needs it so badly. “In early January, Musk announced X as the ‘first platform for video,’” he explains. “The idea that X isn't actually a failed social network, but the start of a video app that could beat YouTube, is just a mad scramble to keep investors from taking the site back.”
Meanwhile, Amazon, which has spent a fortune on shows like Rings of Power and Citadel with little to show for it, has clearly realized that for Gen Z, it's less about imitating Hollywood blockbusters and more about short, fun and phone-friendly content. YouTube and TikTok outperform streamers and old-school TV among people under 30; Short of launching a competing platform, acquiring top talent is much cheaper and easier than the $715 million spent on the first season of Rings of Power.
And MrBeast is a top talent in both the new and old school. He's more than just a wildly popular YouTuber—he's very much a one-man industry in his hometown of Greenville, North Carolina. And with his relentlessly optimistic and positive videos, he is the antithesis of all the dark corners of the Internet and Twitter/X that advertisers find so unattractive.
“We hear from ad agencies that clients are fed up with online drama, and if a site doesn't produce enough measurable results to make it important enough not to boycott, then they'll just leave it behind. says Joseph Tisdale, technical lead at Enders Analysis.
Unlike, say, Andrew Tate, Donaldson is almost cartoonishly healthy and has been nicknamed the Willy Wonka of Greenville. According to a Business Insider profile, he has built production studios in the city, bought a cul-de-sac with five houses to house employees and friends, and has a total workforce of about 250 people. (Donaldson himself lives in a “modest” house, which he reportedly bought for $318,000.)
Josh Lewis, president of the Greenville development group Eastern North Carolina Alliance, says MrBeast has “expanded Greenville's financial footprint” and now counts YouTube content creation as one of the city's largest businesses, along with laboratory instrument manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, forklifts and fishing boats. Donaldson makes monthly calls to Greenville Mayor P.J. Connelly, a former Los Angeles Angels pitcher, to discuss more ambitious shoots that might require police and fire trucks.
MrBeast opens its first restaurant in New Jersey, September 2022. Photo: Getty
“He brings people here, he films here, he hires people here, and those dollars that he pays in wages stay in our community,” Connelly said. . “They are spending at our local restaurants, local retail outlets, buying or renting homes in our area.”
If that seems a little over the top for someone who makes YouTube videos, his 2021 performance, $456,000 Squid Game in Real Life! 456 participants took part in the competition based on the Netflix series. Participants were paid $1,000 a day, and the winner took home a prize of nearly half a million dollars. The challenge cost $2 million to create and produce, plus another $1.5 million in salary and prizes, according to Donaldson.
And he posts similar videos on average once a week with titles like “I Spent 7 Days Buried Alive”, “Every Country on Earth Is Fighting for $250,000”, “I Gave Mine $100,000” 000th subscriber Island” and “I built Willy Wonka's chocolate factory!”
Even the most casual reader will notice the dominance of numbers in the titles of these videos. It's the result of Donaldson – then a student at Greenville Christian Academy, a small evangelical school on the rural outskirts of town – spending five years obsessively studying the site after he was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. He posted his first video under the username MrBeast6000, a short clip of himself playing Minecraft, and then made a series of Minecraft videos with a dodgy microphone and low-grade commentary.
Real video game of MrBeast in squid Credit: MrBeast/YouTube
Every birthday, he helpfully updates his follower count using a chart from the previous year. To be fair, growth was slow at first. On his 12th birthday he had one follower. By age 13, that number had grown to 10. He hit a million just before his 19th birthday in 2017, when his tricks were still at a fairly low level – he counted to 100,000 in 40 hours and watched a terrible hip-hop video It' ;s Everyday Bro by YouTube star turned boxer Jake Paul for 10 hours straight.
Obsessing over the mechanics of virality – from the perfect headlines to the perfect thumbnail – he also found success in 2017 with a much underrated moment of charity… walking up to a homeless man and giving him $10,000 in a brown envelope. It became a huge hit and defined his creative direction. He recently paid for “1000 Blind People Seeing for the First Time,” took on “EVERY Dog in the Dog Shelter,” and “Tipped Waitresses with Real Gold Bullion.”
This mixture of absurdity, extremes and attention-grabbing philanthropy sent his channel into the stratosphere, surpassing his hero PewDiePie, who preferred to pay people to hold up signs reading “Death to the Jews.” Donaldson gives away millions of dollars a year, either at random to cheer up the staff or as a reward for his ridiculous tasks: $20,000 to the last person to leave a puddle of ramen noodles, $50,000 to the last one to leave the revolving door, $1 million dollars. so that the latter removes his hand from the huge wad of money. They generate hundreds of millions of views, which in turn generate revenue through advertising and sponsors who fund even more outlandish stunts, becoming a curious virtuous circle.
Jimmy Donaldson with Dwayne Johnson in 2022 Photo: Getty
And it's spawned a small army of copycat MrBeasts, who fill TikTok and Instagram with captions like “man pays poor mom for groceries at checkout” or “I pay for all you can carry.” Some are more political, like Jesus Morales aka Juixe, who specializes in helping Mexican workers, and twins Brooklyn and Bailey, who posted “Visiting ALL 50 States Before Your Next Period” to raise money for charities that help women. who cannot afford hygiene products.< /p>
While the Beast himself is decidedly apolitical, he stokes anger by, among other things, abandoning his Christianity, working with his longtime friend and trans woman Chris Tyson, and – inevitably – giving away all that money. “MrBeast is turning our children into money-obsessed narcissists,” read a recent headline in a liberal newspaper.
Another person who doesn't seem to be happy with this is Donaldson himself. He says he's not very good at making friends, and told Lex Friedman's podcast that the best thing for his mental health is to “give in” to his “innate nature to work.” He spends most of his time in his huge production warehouse known as Studio C, telling Friedman that he has only left the studio once in the past 20 days.
I will give 10 random people who repost this and follow me $25,000 for fun ($250,000 that my X video made)
I&# 39; we will choose winners in 72 hours
— MrBeast (@MrBeast), January 22, 2024
“All I do is wake up every day and obsess over how to make the best video possible,” Donaldson said in another interview. “It's the only thing that's ever made me happy.”
Perhaps he's selling himself a little short here. In addition to being “obsessed with how to make the best videos possible,” he also spent some time launching a line of snack bars called Feastables (tagline: “Feast Like a Beast”), which often features prominently in his videos. In September, Beast Holdings, the YouTube star's parent company, filed for a slew of trademarks covering cereal fruits, nut- and seed-based snacks, as well as candy bars, cookies, breakfast cereals and gummies. Hasbro has a range of guns to bust – the Nerf Pro Gelfire X – and even a fast food burger chain called MrBeast Burger, which has reportedly brought in $100 million so far.
As for the money, did he earn from Elon? He doesn't seem to want it. Donaldson announced Tuesday that he plans to give it away, giving away $25,000 to 10 randomly selected followers.
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