In Jimmy Donaldson’s high-school yearbook, under the subheading “Things people might not know about you”, he wrote: “I have a YouTube channel.” He wasn’t exaggerating — even his mum didn’t know he’d been making videos in his bedroom for five years.
And why would she? The videos were mainly short clips of Minecraft or Call of Duty gameplay interspersed with occasional video essays on other YouTubers, estimating their net worth or studying their content strategies. Donaldson’s teenage face rarely made an appearance; he had fewer than 1,500 subscribers for the first two years and would frequently take long breaks from uploading.
Donaldson is now known primarily by his moniker, MrBeast. He’s 26 and, at the time of writing, has 455 million subscribers across his six different channels. This makes him the most subscribed YouTuber on the platform as well as a fully-fledged multi-millionaire — he earned an estimated $101m (£81m) in 2023, according to Forbes, who suggested he may become the first billionaire YouTuber. He’s in the big leagues and made headlines for claiming he turned down a trip on the doomed Titanic submersive which imploded last year. On Twitter, he wrote: “I was invited earlier this month to ride the Titanic submarine, I said no. Kind of scary that I could have been on it.”
As MrBeast, he’s moved on from the Minecraft content and is now famous for giving away his millions — to pizza delivery guys, homeless people, waitresses, you name it. He also pulls off elaborate and expensive YouTube stunts that seem beyond the realms of human imagination (real-life Squid Game, anyone?).
In a video from 2014, when Donaldson was 16, he thanked his audience for helping him to reach a landmark 1,500 subscribers. “I’ve hit 1,500 subs, which is just a crazy number,” he said in a voice recording, which echoes over his Call of Duty gameplay. “It looks so cool to look at, I just like looking at it, like 1,500 subs, that’s a lot of people.” Nearly a decade later, it’s not uncommon for Donaldson to average 100,000 new subscribers per day. He’s the richest and most popular person you’ve never heard of.
So how has this awkward North Carolina teen become more wealthy than Jay Z, Drake, Billie Eilish and the US President (by Forbes 2020 estimates), without anyone over 18 even clocking? “He’s really studied human attention”, says videographer, content creator and YouTube expert Harry Ainsworth. “They say in video [strategy], the first five seconds are what someone will watch before they click off and MrBeast has mastered that. As soon as you click on a video, he’s shouting at you. Everything from the title, to the thumbnail, to the first few seconds. It’s crafted for virality.”
MrBeast has moneyballed his way to viral fame, but he wasn’t always a YouTube genius. Here’s how he became the under-the-radar Gen Z juggernaut he is today.
Obsessed with YouTube from a young age
Born in Wichita, Kansas, Donaldson was raised in the city of Greenville, North Carolina, to which he’s remained fiercely loyal. He attended the local Christian private school, Greenville Christian Academy, where he felt out of place and “like a weirdo” due to his early obsession with YouTube. “For me [growing up], there was like zero people within a one-hour radius that actually loved YouTube like I did,” he told The Colin and Samir Show. “Back then I didn’t realise, ‘Oh, I just need to find different people,’ I thought ‘My whole life I’ll just never enjoy talking to people.’”
He started making YouTube videos at 13, with his Minecraft, Call of Duty and video essay formats. He became monetised (where you’re eligible to earn money from people clicking the ads on your videos) aged 15, though he initially made very little pocket money from his hobby.
“It’s not like I was worrying about where my next meal would come from, but we weren’t the most well off,” he’s said of his family’s finances. When Donaldson graduated from high school at 18, his mum convinced him to go to the local college, East Carolina University. “It was pretty simple, I said ‘Jimmy, you go to college, you can stay in the bonus room upstairs,’” his mum Sue recollected in 2021.
The problem was, Jimmy wasn’t interested. “I didn’t want to go to college, I don’t care,” he said of his college experience, “For me, I hate school, I hate it, I just wanted to make YouTube videos.” So, that’s what he did. Instead of attending classes, Donaldson would tell his mum he was heading to college, then sit in his car in the university car park and edit YouTube videos.
This is where Donaldson first gained traction, with viral video formats where he did surprisingly entertaining mundane tasks. These included counting from one to 10,000 in one sitting (it takes him roughly three hours), or wrapping himself in 100 layers of clingfilm. “The first video I saw of [MrBeast’s] was when he was chanting Logan Paul’s name and he says it 100,000 times,” says Ainsworth. “He just set up his camera and it was in 720p [a poor video resolution] and he got popular because of this. The content isn’t necessarily enriching, it’s just an absolute spectacle, because you’re thinking ‘Who would do this?’ especially when these videos would be about 10 hours long.”
After “grinding” away on inane videos like this for weeks and lying to his mum about his college attendance, Donaldson started making $20,000 (£16,000) a month, so he came clean and moved out.
Then, as the going was finally getting good, Jimmy was offered his first brand deal for $5,000 (£4,000), aged 20. What he did with it next changed everything.
You’ve gotta give money to make money
Instead of pocketing the $5k or making some basic affiliate YouTube content, Donaldson haggled with the brand, asking them to double the money so he could give it away to a homeless person. “I was pacing around my neighbourhood for three hours convincing this [brand manager] guy on the phone,” Donaldson has since recalled, “saying ‘just double the money, I promise the video will go viral. $10,000 just looks better in a title, it’ll get more views, I promise your [brand] will do better.’” The video attracted more than 10 million views and kicked off a long line of performative philanthropy content, a subgenre MrBeast is now credited as having invented.
“This [giving money to homeless people] had been done a few times before on YouTube, but never with that amount of money,” Ainsworth says. “That was the video that started it all, that kicked off brands giving MrBeast huge amounts of money to spend.”
While it’s not uncommon for Donaldson to spend upwards of $1 million (£800,000) on a single video these days, this was five years ago, when he was a recent college drop-out. It worked, so he kept giving out money. Since this first stunt, Donaldson has given $10k tips to waitresses and pizza delivery guys; bought a homeless man a house; dropped $20,000 (£16,000) bills from a drone; adopted every dog at an animal shelter and found them a home; offered a million dollars to fans but only allowed them a minute to spend it; and, each time, the videos have garnered millions of views (he has an entirely separate channel for this kind of stunts, Beast Philanthropy, which has 13 million subscribers alone). When he first started pulling these stunts, MrBeast was getting big, but nowhere near the level he is now. Donaldson often spent more than the video brought in via ad revenue and brand deals. Someone needed to balance the books.
Enter Reed Duchscher, MrBeast’s manager. “[Donaldson] had a million subscribers when I met him,” Duchscher recalled, “and he was like ‘I’m gonna have 10 million subs by the end of the year’, I was like ‘9 million subs in a year, this guy is crazy.’” But the pair got to work, with Duchscher streamlining Donaldson’s content and getting rid of anything that could potentially put off brands.
“Early on, there were some questionable videos, where he was like shooting certain things,” Duchscher said. “Our biggest video was ‘Can 50,000 magnets stop a bullet,’ [which got] 57 million views in three days, and in 2018 that was a banger, but most [brands] were like, ‘Woah, guns? No way.’ So I was like, ‘We gotta stop the guns.’” The brand deals got bigger and better, moving from obscure apps and mobile games to major names including Amazon and Nissan.
It also boosted views and subscribers (they hit that 10 million-sub mark, and then some), because his more child-friendly content carved out a solid fanbase of devoted teenage boys. “He’d like to think that his audience is a split of men and women, young and old, but actually I think he had attracted a younger demographic for sure,” Ainsworth says. “It’s quite childish, his content, but that’s where the money is — YouTube is very restrictive on people that have swear words or hateful content so you want to actually break into the child audience market, because it’s safer and brands will want to put more money in.”
And they have — Mr Beast has spent up to $4 million (£3.2 million) on videos in recent years thanks to brand deals and his skyrocketing success. If you’re questioning how someone could possibly spend that much money on making a 20-minute video, well, read on.
Squid Game, studios and larger-than-life videos
Like MrBeast, many YouTubers are now backed by huge production companies of their own making — the idea that it’s just a man with charisma and a camera is long dead. People such as Jake Paul, David Dobrik and MrBeast have all been assisted by full production teams with professional filming studios and budgets bigger than Oscar-winning films.
Donaldson has a whole “campus”, MrBeastHQ, at his disposal, with studios the size of aircraft hangars, warehouses full of props left over from previous videos (dune buggies, slime etc) and big plots of land. One of his studios (there are multiple in MrBeastHQs) is even estimated to be the largest on the East Coast of the US.
It’s this, and his new financial freedom, that has allowed Donaldson to create ambitious videos that seem almost out of place on YouTube given their whopping budget and crazy production requirements. The most well-known of these is where the MrBeast team recreated the game levels from Squid Game, the hit Netflix series, with near-exact replicas in real life. Not only did he recruit 456 people to play the game, but he also gifted the winner the $456,000 (£365,000) prize money, as depicted in the Netflix series.
The video was a revelation on YouTube — it had 406 million views, 15 million likes and 618,000 comments at the time of writing. Donaldson and his team recreated everything meticulously, to the point where they even got express permission from Hwang Dong-hyuk, the creator of Squid Game, to pull off the replica.
But with every huge success like Squid Game, there’s a video which doesn’t make the cut, even if it has a ludicrously large budget. “There’s tonnes of videos in the graveyard,” Duchscher has said. “One video, such a banger too, where they [Mr Beast’s team] travelled to the seven wonders of the world [...] and it never got posted because they could never figure out the thumbnail for this video.” Ultimately, Donaldson is as meticulous in the content he puts out as he is in recreating silly games from Netflix series. “If he doesn’t think the video is a good video, then it’s not getting posted,” Duchscher claims.
Controversies and criticisms
The kind of perfectionism that has become key to MrBeast’s success is not without its faults. In a report from the New York Times, as many as 11 former employees alleged that Donaldson’s "demeanour changed when the cameras weren't around" and that there was a “difficult work environment” behind the scenes of his videos. So it’s not all slime and good times at MrBeastHQ, then. (Representatives for Donaldson have yet to comment on these allegations and refused comment to The New York Times.)
Motivated by his performative philanthropy, employees thought MrBeast’s generous persona would stretch into real life. Not necessarily — former employee Matt Turner, who worked as a video editor for Donaldson for over a year, told the New York Times that Donaldson “berated” him nearly every day during his time working there, and frequently used an ableist (discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities and/or people who perceive themselves as being disabled) slur to do so. These interactions would upset Turner so much that would be in tears, he said.
Donaldson also previously used homophobic slurs in older videos, something which his team did acknowledge in response to the New York Times. “When Jimmy was a teenager and was first starting out, he carelessly used, on more than one occasion, a gay slur. Jimmy knows there is no excuse for homophobic rhetoric,” the representative said, adding that Donaldson “has grown up and matured into someone that doesn’t speak like that.”
As well as allegations of verbal abuse and the use of slurs, ex-employees also claim that Donaldson was reluctant to give his co-workers credit unless they were his childhood friends (“I was not to be credited for anything I did,” Turner told the Times. “I’d ask for credit, he’d credit someone else”) and placed “unreasonable demands” upon his staff.
One video editor, Nate Anderson, moved to Greenville to work for MrBeast, but quit after a week due to his perfectionism. “Nothing ever worked for him,” Anderson said of Donaldson, “he always wanted it a certain way”. Anderson later released a tell-all YouTube video where he spoke openly about his gripes with Donaldson. “My Experience Editing for Mr. Beast (Worst Week of My Life)” outlined how he had received death threats after criticising the beloved MrBeast, despite many of his key fans being teenagers and children.
In October 2024, fellow YouTuber Rosanna Pansino said she had reported Donaldson to the FBI over Telegram messages - attributed to his former employees - which referenced and joked about underage sexual activity, Nazi symbolism and incest. In her own YouTube video, ‘MrBeast knew all along’, Pansino said the alleged messages were attributed to Donaldson’s longtime collaborator Ava Kris Tyson.
I have reported what I found and my concerns to the authorities @FBI. Hopefully they will look into these MrBeast Telegram Company Chats Logs and other concerns. @Youtube @TeamYouTube #mrbeast
— Rosanna Pansino (@RosannaPansino) October 27, 2024
Earlier this year, Tyson - a fellow YouTuber - stepped down from her co-hosting duties with Donaldson after being accused of sending inappropriate messages to a minor. In her video, Pansino shows screenshots of the alleged messages and claims that Donaldson was aware of Tyson’s past. When Tyson stepped down, Donaldson said he was “disgusted” by the allegations. “I have been focused on hiring an independent third party to conduct a thorough investigation to ensure I have all the facts,” he said on X.
He added: “That said, I’ve seen enough online and taken immediate action to remove Ava from the company, my channel, and any association with Mr Beast. I do not condone or support any of the inappropriate actions.”
Donaldson and Tyson are yet to respond to the messages and allegations made by Pansino.
Donaldson’s philanthropy has also drawn criticism, despite its surface-level kindness. Vice writer Katie Way described how she followed MrBeast on TikTok, not because she enjoyed his content, but because there was a small chance that one day someone would stop her in the street and ask if she followed MrBeast on TikTok. If she said yes, she said they could hand her a suitcase of cash. She knows this because she’s already seen it happen in a MrBeast video, which she finds concerning.
“There’s just something ugly about the ease with which these influencers and content creators part with the cash,” Way writes. “The act of walking through the streets and handing out hundred-dollar bills like they’re pamphlets is a more blatant display of wealth than any car or article of clothing could be. It’s also hard to watch ‘regular’ people get excited about what for them, for most of us, is probably a life-changing amount of money, because it calls to mind the constant state of precarity most of us live in, whether or not we know it.”
Donaldson occasionally defends himself against these allegations of charity for views. After he paid for 1000 people to have cataract surgery (and made a video about it, titled “1000 people see for the first time”), TechCrunch criticised his conflation of cataracts with blindness as “systemic ableism.” Donaldson replied to the tweet “So you’d prefer we don’t help people get life-changing surgery they want and they asked for?”
So you’d prefer we don’t help people get life changing surgery they want and they asked for?
— MrBeast (@MrBeast) February 11, 2023
His journey from YouTuber to Elon Musk imitator
What do MrBeast and the viral Big Red Boots have in common? They’ve both worked with MSCHF (the retailer of the boots) on projects designed to set the internet on fire. In 2020, MrBeast made his first real foray into additional business ventures when he collaborated with MSCHF on a one-time multiplayer app called “Finger on the App”. This involved the last player in the world to have their finger on the app screen winning $25,000 (£20,010).
In the end, Donaldson had to ask players to give up after 70 hours and rewarded four different participants with $20,000 (£16,000). Its sequel, Finger on the App 2, with an increased prize money of $100,000 (£80,000), was so successful that the flood of downloads caused the app to crash. Developers had to re-adapt it for the increased amount of players. The winner eventually won the 100k after 51 hours spent with their finger on the app screen.
His next venture was the “world’s first virtual restaurant”, MrBeast Burger, designed in partnership with Virtual Dining Concepts, in November 2020. Visitors to the virtual restaurant can buy MrBeast burgers, which are then made in real participating restaurants, and delivered to customers’ houses. Donaldson also created a free pop-up restaurant to promote his burger franchise (via a YouTube video, of course), which attracted thousands of visitors, with the line reaching 20 miles at points.
MrBeast Burger proved successful, with expansions to Canada and the UK (there are five locations, all in London) taking place within six months of its launch.
Then, in January 2022, Donaldson turned to another food-based business idea: Feastables, his own food company. The company launched with its own brand of chocolate bars called “MrBeast bars” which one Mashable journalist called “pretty good.” Like the “free restaurant” which he used to promote MrBeast Burger, Donaldson used the power of YouTube to hard-launch Feastables — by creating a real-life version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. The marketing power was real: Feastables reportedly made $10 million (£8 million) in its first few months of operation.
MrBeast’s pivot from content creator to businessman is all part of his longstanding mission to become a world-changing entrepreneur, cut from the same cloth as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. But what does a work obsessive such as Jobs, Musk or, in this case, Donaldson, do in their spare time? And do they even have any spare time?
Life outside of YouTube (or lack thereof)
“Imagine spending 10 years of your life only thinking about one thing every single day,” Donaldson has said of his obsession with YouTube, admitting that his whole life is centred around content creation.
“I was so obsessed [when he was younger], I’m telling you, it’s unhealthy,” though he argues that the perception of his obsession has changed due to his success. “At some point, you cross that tipping point where people go from judging you, like, ‘You’re too obsessed, you’re a freak, to ‘Oh, woah, congrats, look at you [...] It’s kind of blurry where that line changes.”
We do know a few things about his personal life, though. MrBeast has had two girlfriends: Maddy Spidell, a fellow YouTuber whom he dated for three years from 2019 to 2022; and Thea Booysen, a South African eSports commentator and Twitch streamer, who he’s been with since last year. The pair travel together a lot, attend award shows, and she’s even appeared in one of his videos when he was low on willing participants (100 Girls vs 100 Boys compete on who can stay in a circle for the longest time to win $500,000 (£400,000).
He’s a family-oriented man and has stayed in North Carolina for that reason (MrBeastHQ is based there). He also employs his mum, Sue, who works at MrBeastHQ and was one of his first employees.
Donaldson is protective over his friends, including former friend Tyson, who was revealed to be in the process of transitioning and faced transphobic abuse as a result last year. After YouTuber SunnyV2 released a video titled “Why Chris Will Soon Be a Nightmare For MrBeast”, Donaldson hit back in a rare show of anger, tweeting: “Yeah. This is getting absurd. Chris isn’t my ‘nightmare’, he’s my f***** friend and things are fine. All this transphobia is starting to piss me off.”
Despite making more than $100 million (£80 million) last year, Donaldson insists that he doesn’t live a lavish life. “I mean, like, money is cool, but, you know, I live in my studio,” he told the My First Million podcast. “I don’t have, like, a mansion. I don’t drive a Lamborghini. So, it’s like, I like money because I can hire more people, and grow a business but not so I can increase my lifestyle, or whatever.”
In this same podcast, the host points out Donaldson’s rather telling choice of decor for his office. “A bench press directly next to the desk, and then the walls were just like, a Steve Jobs quote, an Elon [Musk] quote, a Steve Jobs quote. There was, like, a timeline. Like, at this age, Steve Jobs was here.”
It might be hard to take a man who started out making Minecraft videos seriously. However, Donaldson has proven over and over again that he doesn’t care if you like him or not — you’ll watch him at some point. And, even if you don’t, everyone under the age of 18 already is anyway.
