Nature of the Beast
Why would anyone spend 50 hours buried alive just to make a YouTube video? Jimmy Donaldson— a.k.a. MrBeast—had 54 million reasons last year. The world’s top-earning creator makes his mark through collaboration, not competition, and he has gotten rich by giving money away.
Why would anyone spend 50 hours buried alive just to make a YouTube video? Jimmy Donaldson—a.k.a. MrBeast—had 54 million reasons last year. The world’s top-earning creator makes his mark through collaboration, not competition, and he has gotten rich by giving money away.
Jimmy Donaldson, a sweetfaced 24-year-old YouTuber, is dressed up as Willy Wonka, complete with a purple velvet topcoat, oversize gold bow tie and orange top hat. The 6-foot-4 creator known as “MrBeast” is making a video to promote Feastables, the candy bar brand he launched last winter. He has lured 10 fans who found “golden tickets” in one of his MrBeast Bars to a warehouse in eastern North Carolina that Donaldson built. There they find a faux chocolate factory with huge gummy bears hanging off tree branches in in a lollipop forest and, just like in the movie, a real chocolate river flowing into a waterfall. In a room lined with bouncy marshmallows the contestants stand on spinning peppermints. First one to fall loses. The winner takes home $500,000, a new car and a bite-size piece of Donaldson’s fame.
It’s silly G-rated fun—and wildly profitable. That one 17-minute video has racked up 121 million views in the last six months, and MrBeast has made thousands more. He earned $54 million last year, including $32 million from ads across his dozen-plus channels and $9 million from sponsored content. He’s the most-subscribed-to YouTube personality in the world, with 112 million. His earnings, already the highest of any social media creator, are set to double in 2022 to as much as $110 million. “A lot of people still see YouTubers as a subclass of influencers,” he says. “They still just don’t truly understand the influence a lot of creators have.”
In the hypercompetitive, occasionally nasty world of social media, MrBeast is a collaborator. In November, to celebrate becoming the top YouTuber, he enticed 11 YouTuber friends including LazarBeam (20.2 million subscribers), GeorgeNotFound (10.5 million) and Callux (4 million) to compete for a $2.5 million private jet. (It was an endurance contest à la Hands on a Hardbody: Whoever kept their hand touching the plane the longest won.) Donaldson once gave his buddy Ludwig, a video game streamer with 3.7 million subscribers, a video that cost him $1 million to make . . . for free. It just wasn’t right for MrBeast. Donaldson’s videos, typically made on budgets of $1.5 million to $3 million, are famous for silly stunts (MrBeast counts to 100,000; MrBeast is buried alive for 50 hours in a coffin) and for giving out large sums of money ($10,000 to $1 million) for doing things like stealing a diamond in a warehouse guarded by laser alarms, or staying inside a circle painted in his field for 100 days. That’s a lot of money going out the door. But much more is coming in thanks to YouTube, Facebook and TikTok.
“It’s pretty simple. Honestly, I got my first brand deal for $10,000 and I gave it away. I got it, went outside and gave it to a homeless person,” Donaldson says. “I don’t want to play it up too much. It just felt good. It’s a world where I take 10 grand and light it on fire and make 20 grand.”
Donaldson is the sole owner of his studio but is looking to sell a small stake. If he has his way, 10% could cost $150 million. A deal that rich would value the studio at $1.5 billion, making Donaldson the world’s first billionaire YouTuber, his 90% stake worth $1.4 billion. Even now, Forbes estimates Donaldson is worth some $500 million. “Your probability of being a billionaire is higher if you don’t make that your goal,” Donaldson says. “Just focus on making a company that is dope.”
He is moving quickly to tether his online fame to offline businesses. Donaldson sold 4 million Feastables bars, each variety made with organic cacao and fewer than six ingredients, in the
three months after its January 2022 launch. The brightly packaged candy bars are now available online and in 4,700 Walmart stores. Donaldson is the majority owner, with venture investors pumping in a reported $5 million for 20%.
Feastables follows Donaldson’s success with MrBeast Burger, which started out as a deliveryonly virtual restaurant in December 2020 and quickly became the fastest-growing restaurant brand in the country. Feastables is more profitable, pulling in an estimated 40% gross margin compared to around 30% for the burger chain. But MrBeast Burger has bigger reach: In 2021 it had $70 million in annual sales, and it’s on track to hit $100 million in sales this year.
“If we manage to stay the largest YouTube channel in the world for the next five to 10 years, the opportunities are limitless,” Donaldson says from his studio workshop, surrounded by a Lamborghini and buckets of fake dollar bills.
The shy younger son of a single mom in the military who worked two overnight shifts a week, Donaldson moved around a lot as a kid and often spent nights alone. He started posting to YouTube as “MrBeast6000” in 2012, when he was 13. Back then he shot videos on his brother’s hand-medown laptop. It lacked a microphone, so the clips had no sound. At first, Donaldson kept his online persona a secret, but his mother, Sue, found out when MrBeast hit 10,000 subscribers. She was surprised but thought little of it until he dropped out of community college in 2016 after just two weeks to become a full-time creator. Not wanting to enable him, she kicked him out of the house.
After he filmed giving away that $10,000 to a homeless man, Donaldson realized the sheer viral power of simply giving money away. Like a Gen Z version of Publishers Clearing House, he started filming himself giving strangers stacks of cash. By 2020 Donaldson was earning $24 million a year. The next year that figure doubled.
The stunts don’t stop. This winter, during the Southern Hemisphere’s warmer months, he plans to film 100 hours in Antarctica. He has greenlit a video game—what it’s all about is top secret, but that won’t matter to the 30 million subscribers to his gaming channel. Feastables will go global and expand into protein bars, maybe frozen food.
The MrBeast Burger chain is a joint venture with Virtual Dining Concepts, owned by Planet Hollywood’s Robert Earl. Donaldson was just 22 when MrBeast Burger launched, and he needed all the help he could get. Now, though, he’d like more control: His stake generated $3 million in 2021, just 4% of that year’s sales.
That’s why, over Labor Day weekend, Donaldson rolled up to New Jersey’s American Dream Mall to open his first physical restaurant. Some 20,000 fans lined up. Many had camped out overnight. Donaldson and his crew served 5,000 burgers. In the works is an outpost in Minnesota’s Mall of America. A dozen other locations could open next year.
“What I do is just like a zombie,” Donaldson says. “I get up and I obsess over it. I obsess over it until I fall asleep. I dream about it. I wake up and I do it again, to a fault. Nothing outside my business gets any attention.”
FINAL THOUGHT
“NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST. IF YOU DON’T KNOW THAT, THEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE THE FINISH LINE IS.”
—Garry Shandling