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Jimmy Donaldson was thirteen years old in February 2012 when he uploaded his first YouTube video from his bedroom in Greenville, North Carolina, under the handle MrBeast6000. The early uploads were Minecraft and Call of Duty Let's Plays, tip videos for aspiring creators, and a strange recurring series in which he tried to estimate the net worth of other YouTubers by combing through their AdSense math. He was born in Wichita, Kansas on May 7, 1998, raised by au pairs because his parents were both military and worked long hours, and forced to quit baseball in his teens after a Crohn's disease diagnosis. He dropped out of Pitt Community College in late 2016. His mother kicked him out of the house when he refused to go back.
By mid-2016 the channel had about 30,000 subscribers. Donaldson later described the next five years as "relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm." He would order Uber Eats and sit at the computer all day comparing thumbnails, click-through rates, and viewer-retention curves with a small group of other young creators. The thesis he settled on was narrow and specific: YouTube's recommendation system rewards two metrics above all others — click-through rate on the thumbnail and the percentage of viewers still watching at minute ten. Every other artistic choice is downstream of those two numbers.
In January 2017 he applied the thesis. He sat in front of a camera and counted, out loud, from one to one hundred thousand. The shoot took about forty hours. Some segments were sped up so the runtime stayed under twenty-four. The video pulled tens of thousands of views in days, and the channel's growth curve bent. By 2018 he had given away over a million dollars in stunt prizes and Tubefilter was calling him "YouTube's biggest philanthropist." His first sponsorship, from a digital collectibles app called Quidd, paid him $10,000 in June 2017. He gave the entire ten thousand to a homeless man on camera. That set the template.
The 2018 PewDiePie versus T-Series subscriber war was the first time he weaponized a platform-wide story. He bought billboards and radio ads telling people to subscribe to PewDiePie, then bought up rows of seats at Super Bowl LIII and dressed his crew in shirts that spelled out "Sub 2 PewDiePie." A March 2019 real-life Apex Legends battle royale, sponsored by Electronic Arts, paid out $200,000 to winners. An April 2020 rock-paper-scissors tournament drew 662,000 concurrent viewers — at the time the most-watched live YouTube Original ever. In November 2021 he uploaded "$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life," a recreation of the Netflix show with 456 contestants competing for $456,000. It hit 130 million views in a week.
Forbes ranked him YouTube's highest-earning creator in January 2022, estimating $54 million in 2021 income. He surpassed 100 million subscribers on July 28, 2022, became the most-subscribed individual on YouTube on November 17, 2022 at 112 million, and reached 200 million in October 2023. On June 2, 2024, his main channel passed the Indian music label T-Series at 267 million subscribers — the first individual to hold the most-subscribed-channel title since 2013. On July 10, 2024, he became the first YouTuber to cross 300 million. On June 1, 2025, he crossed 400 million. As of May 2026 the count is 482 million.
By 2022 each flagship video reportedly cost about a million dollars to produce, funded by AdSense, brand deals, and a stable of lower-budget reaction and gaming side channels. By 2023 he employed over 250 people. The same retention discipline got copied across the platform — Taylor Lorenz, writing in March 2024, named the dominant YouTube editing style "MrBeastification": loud sound effects, fast cuts, flashing lights, zero pauses. Other creators went broke trying to imitate the production budget.
The consumer brands came next. MrBeast Burger launched in December 2020 as a virtual restaurant inside other people's kitchens; it grew to over 2,000 locations and one physical store at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey before he announced in 2024 he was shutting it down over quality complaints. Feastables chocolate, launched January 2022, did about $10 million in sales within months. Lunchly — a Lunchables competitor co-founded with Logan Paul and KSI in September 2024 — drew immediate complaints about mold in shipped product. In March 2024 Donaldson and Amazon MGM Studios announced Beast Games for Prime Video. The December 19, 2024 premiere put 1,000 contestants in a single arena competing for $5 million — the largest single cash prize in television or streaming history. It hit 50 million views in twenty-five days and was renewed for two more seasons. Five contestants sued in September 2024 alleging sexual harassment, denied food and water, and unsafe conditions; Donaldson later said the $100 million Amazon deal was a "poor financial decision" that lost him tens of millions.
In January 2026, Tom Lee's Bitmine led a $200 million investment in Beast Industries at a $5 billion valuation. In February 2026, Beast Industries acquired the Gen Z fintech app Step. Fortune reported the same month that despite a $2.6 billion net worth on paper, Donaldson said he was borrowing cash and didn't have enough in his bank account to buy McDonald's.