MrBeast on His Quest to Turn YouTube Fame Into an Entertainment Empire

If you haven’t heard of Beast Industries, or if watching people potentially burn alive isn’t your thing, perhaps you’ve heard of the company’s namesake founder, MrBeast, a 27-year-old whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson. YouTube is the most popular place to watch videos in the world, and Donaldson, founder of MrBeast, is its biggest star. His main channel has more than 430 million subscribers, more than the population of all but two countries.

Donaldson begins each video by shouting the premise to hook the viewer and dangling a huge reward or twist, typically a large cash prize, to keep people watching.  Donaldson’s channels across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and X reach more than 1 billion unique viewers every 90 days, the company says. “There’s literally not a single company that’s ever existed in the universe that can consistently turn out videos that get over a hundred million views,” he says. “The YouTube channel is truly a one-of-a-kind machine.”

So far he’s leveraged his fame to sell chocolate bars, snack kits and digital tools to help other content creators go viral; in the next few years, he plans to build an animation studio, create a video game platform and write a thriller with author James Patterson.  In this way, Donaldson is part of a larger orbit of content creators building businesses.

Donaldson is operating at a greater scale than his peers. Beast Industries employs about 450 people, more than 300 of whom make videos. Another 100 work on the chocolate business, Feastables, and dozens work on the snack company, Lunchly LLC, and the software company, Viewstats. Beast generated about $450 million in sales last year, evenly split between the video operation and Feastables. Yes, Donaldson pulls in more than $200 million a year in dark chocolate sea salt bars and peanut butter cups, a business projected to double in size in the next few years, according to pitch documents sent to investors.

Beast was valued at $5.2 billion last year in a fundraising round led by Alpha Wave Global LP, an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates. He’d like to take the company public in the next few years.

The channel now known as MrBeast began as MrBeast6000, Donaldson’s pseudonym while playing games on Xbox at home in Greenville. Although he was barely a tween at the time, he was already entrepreneurial.  Donaldson was dabbling in online side hustles, buying knives from China and selling them at five times the price.  His first viral hit with an almost 24-hour video in which he counts from one to 100,000. It previewed what would become the magic formula. It has a catchy title—I Counted to 100,000!—and is built around a stunt that’s both absurd and intriguing.  By 2016, with high school coming to an end, Donaldson knew he wanted to be a YouTuber.

Donaldson wasn’t yet making enough money from YouTube to support himself, but he was obsessed with a topic he couldn’t learn in a classroom: virality. He and his friends watched the most popular YouTube videos and analyzed why they were successful. He’s since codified his precepts in a 36-page memo, leaked online by former employees, titled How to Succeed in MrBeast Production. “I spent basically five years of my life locked in a room studying virality on YouTube,” Donaldson writes.

The chronic loss of money notwithstanding, much of the MrBeast strategy boils down to “Less is more.” Rather than produce 100 videos and hope one hits, he makes one video that he expects will get as many views as possible.

As Donaldson became the most famous YouTuber, he began exploring other businesses. In 2020 he teamed up with Virtual Dining Concepts on MrBeast Burger, a hamburger chain that primarily operated out of ghost kitchens. A year later, he started Feastables.“We’re not where we’re at because I’m a genius-level business guy,” Donaldson says. “I know how to make better content on YouTube than anyone else in the world.”

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