From Zero to Millions: How MrBeast Built a YouTube Empire
MrBeast — real name Jimmy Donaldson — is the biggest YouTube star in the world. Even those who aren’t familiar with YouTube fandom know his name. He’s famous for million-dollar giveaways that, some say, have measurably improved people’s lives. But how did he achieve the mega-fame that he enjoys now? Here, we chart his rise to the top and look at his history, his successes, and his controversies. How did he become what he is today?
Beginnings
MrBeast started on YouTube the same way most everyone else does… posting content and hoping some of it will take off. And he was a mere 13 years old when he uploaded his first video in 2012.
Back in those days, he went by the name “MrBeast6000.” In later years, he’d drop the number. His first videos weren’t the sort of thing he would upload now.
The algorithm
Back in the day, MrBeast mostly uploaded Let’s Play videos and vids guessing at the wealth of popular YouTubers. “There’s a five-year point in my life where I was just relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm,” he told Rolling Stone in 2022.
Then he started to gain popularity… by making fun of people. His “Worst Intros on YouTube” video series started in 2015 and people responded to it by liking and subscribing to his eponymous channel.
Slurs
Once MrBeast became famous some folks looked back on these videos, and on MrBeast’s general persona as a teenager, and they didn’t like what they saw. He used to use homophobic slurs a lot.
This was back in the mid-2010s: by this point, it was generally highly frowned upon to be casually homophobic. This would come back to haunt MrBeast once he became truly famous.
Quitting college
In 2016 MrBeast went to college, but he didn’t like it. All he wanted to do was make YouTube videos, and he told his mother so. But she wasn’t having it: as soon as MrBeast quit college, she threw him out of the house.
In 2019 MrBeast would mark the anniversary of this event on X, then known as Twitter, posting, “3 years ago I dropped out of college and my mom made me move out (because she loves me and just wanted me to be successful) and people thought I was crazy.”
Counting
MrBeast really, really wanted YouTube fame, and eventually he was able to figure out what viewers liked best. In 2017 he posted a video of himself counting to 100,000 — something that took him 40 hours.
This was his first video that went viral. Suddenly MrBeast had what he wanted: internet fame. But there was much more to come, and he started doing more and more outrageous stunts for YouTube.
Nice guy
Some of these stunts were downright dangerous, such as MrBeast’s attempt to stay underwater for 24 hours. But it was precisely because of the danger that people watched. And they were also impressed by videos where MrBeast gave away his YouTube revenue to others.
MrBeast says in a 2018 video, “I genuinely enjoy helping people. It’s something I’ve had an issue with, I’m that much of a nice guy. I don’t know why — and I’m not just saying this to look good — I’ve just always been a really nice guy.”
More and more
It soon became clear that MrBeast had a talent for making deals with big companies — something every successful influencer needs. And brands were queuing up to get advertisements into his videos.
MrBeast grew his empire even more by hiring a bunch of his friends — Nolan Hansen, Chandler Hallow, Tareq Salameh, Kris Tyson, and Karl Jacobs — to join him on his rise to the top. They didn’t necessarily have outstanding media skills, but these friends of MrBeast still managed to help make him even more famous.
Offensive
But with the fame came consternation about MrBeast’s past homophobia. In 2018 The Atlantic tried to interview him about his previous use of slurs, but the publication didn’t get what it wanted.
MrBeast said, “I’m not offensive toward anyone. I’m not offensive in the slightest bit in anything I do. I’m just going to ignore it. I don’t think anyone cares about this stuff.” According to The Atlantic, he then asked if it could do a positive article about him instead.
Hanging up
After that, The Atlantic said, MrBeast “suggested that he respond to a list of questions in writing over email, saying, “Wouldn’t it be easier if I just filled out these answers instead of saying this?’”
And then he’d said, “I’m just a dumb kid that makes YouTube videos and I don’t like doing interviews,” before hanging up. Arguably his own media skills were still not fully developed at this point!
Contests
But none of that dimmed MrBeast’s popularity. He began to make more and more wacky videos where people could win money. These included paying people $10,000 to eat a ghost pepper, or holding a real-life Battle Royale-style contest — without the actual killings, of course — with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
These madcap competitions, with their serious-money prizes, rapidly changed the entire face of YouTube. Suddenly there were multiple people trying to get rich off of giveaways just like MrBeast had done.
Successful model
“It doesn’t matter what the item is, or the topic of the video anymore, really,” YouTube analyst Rob Wilson told The Verge in 2019. “They’re just fascinated in what [MrBeast] does. He has the ideas of a 12-year-old and he turns them into a reality in a way YouTubers haven’t done before.”
He went on, “Ultimately, I think anybody can do it because MrBeast has proved that this is a successful model. It’s probably going to be harder to replicate because it’s not a unique idea anymore. No one is doing it bigger or better than him.”
“The special secret”
In the last few days of 2018, MrBeast shot a new video where he explains “where all that money comes from.” He really is a self-made man, he tells his millions of followers.
“If you want the special secret, if you want to know where it all came from — my parents aren’t that rich, I’m only 20 years old, every dollar I’ve ever made came from YouTube, and YouTube just pays better than you think,” he said.
Both happy
Still, it was a video titled “Giving my mom $100,000,” which really seemed to sum up how MrBeast’s YouTube channel worked. In it, he approached his own mother to give her some of his earnings, but at first she refused to take it.
MrBeast said, “If I don’t give it to you, I don’t have a viral video.” His mom answered, “So, you’re using me for views?” MrBeast replied, “Yes, but you get money too, so we’re both happy.”
#TeamTrees
MrBeast completed a big project in 2019: one called #TeamTrees. The idea was to plant 20 million saplings over the course of the year, and it was very successful, with over 600 other influencers joining in.
The project received donations from big names including Elon Musk, Jeffree Star, and PewDiePie. All of these other people have since had serious allegations about their conduct put to them, but not MrBeast. Apart from his early homophobia, he seems to have avoided any major controversies.
4 billion
By 2020 the MrBeast channel was getting 4 billion views a year, a staggering amount. At this point the Bloomberg website tried to work out what exact formula he’d hit on to have enjoyed such tremendous success.
“Make a clip too long, no one watches, or wants to watch another,” it noted. “Make one too short, people won’t linger. Use a bad thumbnail photo or title and no one will click.”
The extreme
The production values on his videos had grown higher and higher, and it was all paying off. How was he able to make more than he was spending? Well, it all came from people’s desire to see the extreme.
“There’s no doubt that watching someone waste a whole bunch of money, doing something ridiculous with a whole bunch of things, is fascinating,” YouTuber Anthony Padilla said in a 2019 video about MrBeast.
Money
But for MrBeast, wasting money meant bringing in even more: it was a difficult trick to pull off, but he’d managed it perfectly. Meanwhile, copycat creators just weren’t able to achieve the same numbers.
“If I were to assume what the minds of most YouTubers think, it would be mainly just to get views because I don’t think anyone really likes spending $10,000 on a video,” YouTuber Dallas Korol, who knew MrBeast, told The Verge.
Perfect world
MrBeast said in the Bloomberg interview that he wanted to create his own consumer line and buy an e-sports team, but his first priority was always making videos: he was obsessed.
“I can’t envision a world where I’m not making YouTube videos,” he told Bloomberg. “In a perfect world, I live and breathe this, working 12- to 15-hour days until I die.”
Burgers and chocolate
In November 2020 came another MrBeast endeavor, MrBeast Burgers. MrBeast advertised his new venture by promising free food and even a free car to people who made it to the drive-through of the restaurant.
And it probably goes without saying that the event attracted so many customers that in the end, people had to be dispersed by the police. But MrBeast wasn’t stopping there when it came to food brands. In 2022 he launched another one, the chocolate company Feastables.
Beast Philanthropy
It did seem genuinely as though MrBeast genuinely wanted to give back to the community. In 2020 he started Beast Philanthropy, an organization dedicated to making the world a better place.
The official website states Beast Philanthropy will give "long-lasting relief to individuals suffering from homelessness, hunger, and poverty." There’s not a lot of YouTubers who go that far with charity work.
Squid Game
A year after that came a video that sparked a lot of discussion and interest. This was a clip based on Netflix’s popular Squid Game show, a vision of a dystopian Korea where people compete in deadly games for money.
The video was called "$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!" and had people competing for the prize money without, of course, the actual death and carnage in the fictional Squid Game. But some commentators weren’t impressed by this.
Perverse
Part of the reason Squid Game had captured the zeitgeist was due to its portrayal of poverty. And critics said that MrBeast was basically using an anti-capitalist story to pursue capitalist ends: media outlet Vice even called it “perverse.”
“This doesn’t just badly misunderstand the anti-capitalist message of Squid Game, it’s a literal recreation of the villain’s ultimate desire to watch desperate people compete for money purely for his amusement,” they said.
A decent amount
And yet, people were wowed by the production values of the video, which had cost $3.5 million to make. The Los Angeles Times spoke to a reality TV editor, Katherine Griffin, who ran them through it.
“$3.5 million dollars is a pretty decent amount of money to make one episode of a television show, which is essentially what this is,” the expert — who had herself worked on shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars — said.
Huge expense
Griffin went on, “Not only is it professionally edited, but look at the production design, the copying of all of these sets. ... It’s made to look like this fun little thing that people can stream on the bus or whatever, but it was a huge expense to make this video, and a lot of professional people are working on it.”
MrBeast was essentially making TV for YouTube that was every bit as high-quality as traditional television. The reward for this increasingly focused endeavor? More and more subscribers — and with them, more and more money.
Shiny objects
A 2022 interview with Rolling Stone seemed to indicate just how MrBeast felt about all that money. “I don’t want to live my life chasing the next shiny object to the next shiny object,” he said. “It’s a sad, miserable way to go about life.”
All the same, the interviewer talking to him felt obliged to point out that he drove a Tesla Model X, lived in a gated community, and had a custom-built $50k refrigerator in his home.
The biggest ever
The Rolling Stone piece looked at how MrBeast’s personal life was going, but in truth he didn’t seem to have that much of a personal life: he was totally dedicated to his work.
“I want to be the biggest YouTube channel ever,” he said. “Not even for my ego. I don’t know. I just want it. It just gives me something to strive for, to get out of bed and grind for. But it’s also just vanity.”
The grind
The Rolling Stone article noted that MrBeast had a gym in the middle of his kitchen, that he frequently read biographies of successful men, and that he’d hired a life coach.
“I need to just obsess, grind, and keep going,” the YouTube superstar admitted to the magazine. “If you’re on an exponential growth curve, you don’t want to let it flatline.”
Sensitivities
The interviewer observed that MrBeast was “sensitive to any questions about his motivations” when it came to charity. “I have an entire channel built around my nonprofit that I’ve invested ungodly amounts of hours into building, that I’ll never see a single penny out of,” he said.
And he also had some doubts creeping in. “This is all I do, really,” he said at the end of his interview. “I don’t party. I barely have friends. And there is a risk: I look back when I’m 50 and I’m like, ‘Damn, I literally only did that one thing and nothing else.’”
Curing blindness
MrBeast performed another huge stunt in early 2023: paying for cataract surgeries for 1,000 blind people. “Half of all blindness in the world is people who need a ten-minute surgery,” surgeon Jeff Levenson said in the video.
But this — apparently benevolent — latest exercise in audience-gathering also provoked a fresh wave of controversy. MrBeast had undoubtedly done a good thing, but was there an undercurrent of exploitation to it all?
No reward
One person tweeted MrBeast directly. "While it was an amazing piece of altruism on your behalf: why make a video about it?" they said. "Why not just do good with no reward other than self satisfaction, knowing you're making the world a better place?”
“Maybe some people see it as attention-seeking.” And that social media user was far from the only person saying things like that. The blindness-curing video seemed to completely polarize opinion on the internet.
Controversy
USA Today brought in a psychologist, Andrea Bonior, to help explain the controversy. “One potential problem with content like this is that it can be dehumanizing to those who are being helped,” she said.
“We run the risk of turning real people into symbols.” But she also added, “There’s all kinds of evidence that people perform acts of kindness for reasons that aren’t totally pure, and that doesn’t automatically make it a bad thing.”
Spotlight
And there were other people kicking back against MrBeast’s critics, too. Andrew Hodgson, the president of the National Federation of the Blind of the UK, was among those who regarded the YouTube superstar’s intervention in a positive light.
He told the BBC, "Anything that puts a spotlight on such treatable eye conditions like cataracts and provides funding for people to undergo surgery to restore their sight should be welcomed.” He also pointedly asked, “Why would anybody criticize this work and raising awareness of it through film and social media channels?”
Staggering
Naturally, the controversy only served to get still more people watching the video, which for MrBeast and his followers was the most important thing. It also increased his profile as one of the biggest YouTubers in the world.
In July 2023 CNN published an article titled “Behind the staggering success of MrBeast” and brought in experts to try and analyze exactly what magic ingredient made him rise to the top and stay there.
Access
One conclusion was: people tuned in to see someone enjoy a level of wealth that they themselves didn’t have. “He has the money now, and is able to bring viewers access to places to see things that they would never get to see,” media reporter Sara Fischer told CNN.
She went on, “That’s an interesting model, because you’re giving video viewers access to something they would never get to see in real life. Who do you know that gets to stay in a million-dollar hotel?”
Powerful
Another contributor to the article,sociology and cultural studies teacher Vince Miller, said he believed a lot of MrBeast’s success came down to one simple concept — philanthropy makes people feel good.
“It’s quite powerful to tell a ten-year-old kid who has no independent money and limited agency in their life that they can raise money and help people by watching MrBeast’s videos,” he said.
Leadership
In February 2024 Time magazine did an interview with MrBeast as part of its TIME100 Leadership Series. There was, after all, no doubt that MrBeast was a leader in his field now.
Time observed that one of MrBeast’s recent videos, where he and his friends went on vacation and spent vast amounts of money, had attracted double the viewers of the Barbie-Oppenheimer opening weekend.
Reinvesting
Interestingly, MrBeast claimed in the Time interview that he wasn’t very wealthy “right now.” “I’m not naive; maybe one day. But right now, whatever we make, we reinvest,” he insisted.
“Each video does a couple million in ad revenue, a couple million in brand deals. I’ve reinvested everything to the point of — you could claim — stupidity, just believing that we would succeed,” he went on. “And it’s worked out.”
Plans
“In a perfect world, I would own a couple of different companies — chocolate, and maybe a global games company — and then that’s what I would promote in the videos.” MrBeast mused in the interview.
According to him, at present his chocolate “Feastables” brand was bringing in 70 percent of his revenue, but he had big plans for myriad future MrBeast products, including apps and games.
The future
What’s next for MrBeast? Well, in January it came out that he was in talks with Amazon Prime Video to do a show for them. The deal was worth, according to one source, $100 million.
Will he use that money to do more good in the wider world? The YouTube sensation’s philanthropic leanings are certainly one of the more positive elements of this very modern tale, and they seem to constitute a key component of his ongoing success. But whatever happens, it seems MrBeast isn’t going away anytime soon.