You’re sitting at work when suddenly… an unremarkable young man with a scruffy little beard walks up and asks: “Would you quit your job if I gave you $100,000 for it right now?” How would you react? Would you say yes?
Would you like an island of your own? Or your very own Lamborghini? Just like that, as a gift, no strings attached?
Nothing is impossible online, and sometimes meaning is born on the edge of provocation. Mr. Beast—MrBeast—is a fascinating influencer who has gathered more than a hundred million subscribers by simply… giving the money away! He stages a surreal candid camera that isn’t even hidden. He piles up advertising money only to hand it out spectacularly, sometimes with a provocative challenge, sometimes… just because. Is this madness?!
Here’s a Little Pocket Money!
What would it look like if every single item, and I mean every single one, in a supermarket were bought up?
A TV show calls to ask how you’re doing, how the turbulent last few years have treated you. You tell them you’ve lost your job and… it turns out they’re calling to give you $20,000.
Well, you’d hardly call it madness if MrBeast picked you for his next unconventional gift. Is this more a kind of social experiment, or reality TV taken to an unexpected extreme? Or maybe an entirely new genre of entertainment—they call it “expensive stunts”… that matters far less than how interesting the story itself is.
MrBeast’s real name is Jimmy Donaldson and… honestly, you’d hardly notice anything special about him if you ran into him in his native South. He was born in Kansas in 1998 and grew up in North Carolina. Life would have offered him neither worldwide fame nor millions of dollars to give away, if it weren’t for YouTube.
Grandpa Beast
He and his brother were raised by a single mother who worked for the military. At 13, he had never seen more than $50 in one place. “If someone had told me I’d give away a million in an hour, I would have laughed for a long time,” Jimmy says.
As a kid he was into baseball, but he was quite shy, and that held him back. He also had a nasty health problem—since childhood he has suffered from Crohn’s disease, which makes eating hard and brings severe pain.
He can’t remember when he first fell for YouTube; he made his first channel at just 14. He posted childish pranks with his buddies and didn’t even tell his mother.
That was when the nickname MrBeast was born—Mr. Beast, which is about as far from his image and message as you can possibly get. He didn’t even come up with it himself. When he was given a game console and logged on to play online, it assigned him a default username. He liked it so much, though, that he adopted it and still uses it today.
Further into his teens, the illness caused him more and more trouble; he lost 20 kilograms and had no strength for anything. The only thing that gave him pleasure was making more and more silly little videos and posting them online.
I Don’t Give a Dime!
It took him quite a few years to gather his first 10,000 followers, and then he decided… to do even bigger silly things. These turned out to be catchy enough to push his follower count up fast. Forgive the bluntness, but it’s no exaggeration—let me mention that his first truly successful video shows Jimmy counting from 0 to 100,000. Extremely useful and creative, right?
Then came reading encyclopedias; MrBeast showed himself watching anime for 100 hours straight, spinning a fidget spinner for 24 hours… all intellectual endeavors that nevertheless turned out to be unexpectedly successful.
And just as his views began to reach six figures, and his income began to grow with them… it was time to go to college. Somehow, as is typical in our part of the world too, it had always been taken for granted that he would go on to higher education, but he decided he didn’t need it; he had YouTube.
He worked up the courage to tell his mother, and she was more than surprised. But she supported him, especially when she unexpectedly found out that his videos were already earning him enough to move out and live on his own. Networks like YouTube are built so that they pay extremely generously to influencers who have managed to attract a large number of subscribers and whose every new video is guaranteed plenty of views. After all, these platforms “live” on advertising, and every such opportunity guarantees them serious revenue.
Money Goes to Money
Finally free to do only what he wanted, Mr. Beast carried on with his unconventional ideas. At last he bought more serious equipment and threw himself into video experiments. He showed what happens if you put a small microwave inside a big one and turn both on. What explosives do to a $1,000 keyboard.
And then… an unconventional idea came to him that changed everything. What would happen if he simply gave some of the money he earned to someone and showed it happening?
The first lucky one was a homeless man who was more than moved; he hugged him and said that with this $10,000 he would change his life. And 19-year-old Jimmy was moved too, and realized that this was exactly where he saw meaning. In passing on the money he earned in unconventional ways.
“Hi, um, I’m a YouTuber, I want to do something cool, so here’s ten grand,” MrBeast says shyly. “Are you kidding?!”—that, of course, is how almost everyone reacts from then on.
“It’s really cool to see someone’s face light up.”
No Laws When Millions Are Involved
Then he started tipping pizza delivery drivers several hundred dollars. He set up all sorts of contests—for example, he had two football players throw a ball back and forth, each pass worth $1, but a single drop was enough to lose it all. He ordered pizzas from three delivery places, with $1,000 for the driver who showed up first. He punctured a tire with a pickaxe, started flagging down cars, and the driver who stopped to help him won… a car, a brand-new SUV.
“I figured I’d cracked the system!” Jimmy says. “If I make a video and it does well, I can keep going; that way brands don’t just give me money, they help a lot of people while getting advertising at the same time.”
This led to a moment that was special for him, and which, of course, he also showed online. He rang his mother’s doorbell to give her $100,000 to pay off her mortgage.
The Number of the Beast
And so we come to 2018, when Jimmy already had 1.6 million subscribers but almost no money of his own. That’s when he met with a marketing specialist to change the model. The giveaways grew even bigger, and the quality of his video production came close to, and sometimes surpassed, that of television.
He celebrated his 3-millionth subscriber by collecting 3 million one-cent coins to give away. The pile was almost the size of a house. He handed someone his credit card to buy whatever they wanted. He bought a house for a homeless person and adopted every animal from a large shelter.
His views grew incredibly fast. As he puts it, once you hit 100,000 subscribers, the next step isn’t 200,000 but a million. The internet works in such a way that a model that proves successful can grow very quickly, and Mr. Beast’s ideas clearly appeal to the audience.
Gradually, more and more charitable initiatives crept into his ventures. He showed, for example, how he bought up absolutely every item in a hypermarket to donate it all to a food bank.
At the height of the COVID crisis, he set up a mock TV studio where he had people talk about the problems the lockdowns had brought them, and, of course, gave them five-figure sums.
A Round for the House
On the day he hit 40 million subscribers, he decided to celebrate by “buying” a huge restaurant for a day in which… nobody paid; all you had to do was drive through and pick up your food.
By then his fame was considerable, and the line kept growing and growing… until it reached 20 miles! Twenty miles of cars lined up for the free meals. To make up for the long wait, his team went out and started handing out gifts—hundreds of thousands of dollars, game consoles and who knows what else.
Which brings us to 2022, when Jimmy celebrated his 100-millionth follower with a game whose prize was… an entire island! And the contest, though it lasted only about 10 minutes of “airtime,” lived up to the best television standards, in the spirit of Fort Boyard, but at the speed of online life. And, no joke, no trick, the follower who found the final treasure now owns an island.
What comes next? MrBeast now has a team of about 100 people; some are childhood friends, but there are also highly qualified specialists, such as Mark Rober, an engineer with experience at NASA and Apple.
Don’t Mock Me, Little Millionaire
He is turning more and more to social issues. His latest large-scale campaign set out to raise $20 million in just a few months, so that 20 million trees could be planted on every continent except Antarctica.
He raised the money without a hitch. Elon Musk chipped in a whole million dollars and still sits at the top of the list of biggest donors, but serious sums also came from David Benioff, Jack Dorsey and… of course, MrBeast himself.
A huge number of other YouTube stars joined in with offbeat appeals and promos for the campaign, and the videos really stood out for their creativity.
The Man Took the Money…
Today his main channel has 106 million followers, putting Jimmy fifth in the rankings, and two of the channels ahead of him are in Hindi.
His charity channel keeps growing too; there he talks about hunger in America and around the world and raises serious donations. A single one of his campaigns provided 2 million meals. Soon he will start setting up his own food banks in different parts of the US.
Altogether his six channels have 146 million subscribers, which makes MrBeast the biggest brand on YouTube.
In 2020 he launched his own fast-food chain, which delivers from 1,000 locations around the world, and recently, at the opening of his first real restaurant, mass hysteria broke out—the line in East Rutherford, New Jersey, reached… 10,000 people! All of it led to a world record for the most burgers sold in a single day.
Beauty and the Beast
For a long time he dated Maddy Spidell, who is a lifestyle influencer by profession. His new girlfriend, Thea Booysen, is… an influencer, forgive the repetition. Except that her strong suit is the Twitch platform; she comes from South Africa and has degrees in psychology and law.
“When I achieve something impossible, the first thing I do is think about what’s next, something even more impossible,” Jimmy says. He means his online projects. What he himself likes most about what he has achieved is that it shows how “the internet isn’t just a place for empty talk; you can also do positive things there that change the whole world for the better.”
Petitions are circulating online calling for him to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Some say he’s a showman, others call him a philanthropist. The latter may be a stretch; according to various estimates, the 24-year-old Mr. Beast today has a personal fortune of between $60 and $80 million. And, of course, alongside the philanthropy and the improvised contests for big money, he keeps breaking through with content of frankly simple-minded humor.
These American influencers… would surely gain a lot if they learned a thing or two about the craft from ours, homegrown viral stars like Emily with the Scooter or Slavi the Clasher.
Tiger, Tiger
What matters more is that his messages reach an enormous number of people, young people at that. That they may be a challenge to traditional consumer society (on which, however, the whole model rests!). But they also show young people that there are people going hungry who need help. That raising funds for large-scale environmental efforts such as reforestation doesn’t always have to come through finger-pointing.
Online life makes such phenomena possible, where an influencer can afford to produce more expensive and polished video content than the biggest TV networks. And without dazzling with all that much originality, business sense or charisma.
Whatever he may be, what is more interesting is what his popularity has to tell us. Is it really so unusual in our culture to simply give away something that amounts to serious money? Why does it turn out to be so fascinating to watch it happen—because of the one who gives, because of the one who receives… or because, secretly, we too are hoping for easy money?
“I love helping people simply because it makes me happy and makes me feel good. I love seeing their happy faces, I love meeting their excitement,” MrBeast says simply.
Yes, secretly we are all waiting for Santa Claus in one sense or another, forgetting something even more important. That sometimes we can give a few leva, Bulgaria’s currency, to someone in trouble, but, more importantly, that we should stay aware of other people’s troubles in this world, ever more amputated of empathy. And never forget how good it is to sometimes be Santa Claus ourselves…
