Zinvana
Jimmy Donaldson — the 26-year-old behind MrBeast — runs the most-subscribed channel on YouTube and a fast-food chain and a chocolate brand and a media studio. Almost nothing about how he got there is accidental. The kid was treating YouTube like a problem to be reverse-engineered when he was 12.
He grew up in Greenville, North Carolina, the son of an army officer who left when Jimmy was five. His mother Sue raised him and his older brother CJ alone. He was diagnosed with Crohn's disease as a teenager — a chronic gut condition that affects what he can eat, and which he's been pretty open about. He started uploading videos to a channel called "MrBeast6000" in 2012, when he was 13. They were Minecraft commentary videos. Almost no one watched them.
For the next five years he posted constantly. Lets-plays, video-game commentary, weird challenge videos, "worst intros on YouTube" series. He dropped out of East Carolina University after a few weeks because, as he later told interviewers, classes were taking time he could spend on YouTube. His mother told him he had to move out unless he picked a real job. He moved out.
The video that changed everything
In January 2017, Jimmy posted a video called "I counted to 100,000." It was 24 hours of him sitting in a chair counting out loud. He'd cut some bits out, and even with cuts it ran 40 hours; he'd used time-lapse for the boring stretches. The thumbnail was him pointing at a number with his mouth open.
It got 25 million views.
The video itself wasn't the breakthrough — the discovery was. He'd realised that absurd, simple, completable challenges with a clear time investment were what the YouTube recommendation algorithm in 2017 wanted to push. The challenge had to be obvious from the thumbnail. The thumbnail had to make you want to click. The clickbait, weirdly, had to deliver.
He spent the next year doing variations: reading the dictionary, watching Jake Paul's "It's Everyday Bro" for ten hours straight, saying Logan Paul a hundred thousand times. Each one was bigger than the last. He hired his oldest friend Chris Tyson to help. Then his childhood friend Chandler Hallow. Then a video editor named Karl Jacobs. The team got to four. Then ten. Then thirty.
Giving away money on camera
Around 2018 he started a new format: just give people money. Tip a waitress $10,000. Pay off a homeless man's car. Give a stranger $1 million and watch what they do with it. The videos exploded. The criticism — that he was exploiting poverty for views — exploded with them.
His response was to lean harder. He gave away an entire Walmart. He paid for cataract surgery for a thousand blind people. He built houses for hurricane victims. He paid off student debt for a chunk of a small college. The videos pull in 100 to 200 million views each, and the production cost is genuinely astronomical — but the ad revenue and sponsor deals on a 200-million-view video cover the giveaway and then some. The math works because YouTube pays out more on his channel than on basically anyone else's.
The obsession with thumbnails
If you've watched a recent MrBeast video the workflow is hard to miss. Every thumbnail is a wide-eyed face, an arrow, and a number. Every title is a number plus a stake. Every video opens with the stake reiterated in the first three seconds.
This isn't accidental. Jimmy reportedly A/B tests thumbnails by paying for ad spots on other people's videos and seeing which thumbnail performs better. He'll spend $10,000 testing two versions before publishing. He's said in interviews that he's watched probably more YouTube than almost anyone alive — six or seven hours a day for over a decade. The man has data on what gets clicked the way Bill James had data on baseball.
The team in Greenville now has its own warehouses, sound stages, drone operators, animal trainers, and a 100-acre property where they shoot most challenges. The company, Beast Industries, employs more than 250 people across MrBeast Studios, Feastables (his chocolate brand), and the rest.
"I'd rather make a video that gets 200 million views than one that's 'good.' Most of the time those are the same video." — Donaldson, 2022 Time interview
$3.5 million for a Squid Game remake
In November 2021 he recreated the Korean show Squid Game in real life with 456 contestants competing for $456,000. The video cost $3.5 million to make. It hit 200 million views in two weeks and is still the most-viewed video he's ever produced.
It also previewed his next move. Beast Games, a streaming series for Amazon Prime Video built on the same template — 1,000 contestants, $5 million prize — premiered in late 2024. It became the most-watched unscripted Prime Video show ever. Amazon ordered two more seasons before the first one aired.
Feastables, Beast Burger, and the Walmart aisle
The chocolate brand Feastables launched in 2022 with three flavours and a single rule: get into Walmart's checkout-aisle endcap. Within 18 months it was reportedly doing $250 million a year in revenue. Jimmy negotiated his way onto Walmart shelves the same way he climbed YouTube — endless testing, obsessive data, and an audience already pre-built to buy whatever he handed them.
The Beast Burger ghost-kitchen experiment didn't go as well. It launched in 2020 as a delivery-only chain through Virtual Dining Concepts, scaled to 1,700 locations, and then in 2023 he sued the operator for serving food he said was unacceptable. The lawsuit was settled. The chain quietly shrank. He's careful to say he learned from it.
The Chris Tyson, Ava Tyson change
In 2023 Chris Tyson, one of MrBeast's three on-camera regulars and his oldest friend, came out as transgender and changed her name to Ava. Anti-LGBTQ accounts demanded MrBeast fire her. He didn't. He posted a single sentence: "Chris is my friend, and is welcome on my channel any time." Subscriber count kept going up.
Where it gets complicated
Not everything has gone smoothly. In 2024 a Beast Games contestant filed a class-action lawsuit alleging unsafe conditions on set; the case is ongoing. A former employee accused the production company of a toxic workplace; an internal investigation followed and the company says it has changed its practices. A long-time collaborator, Ava Kris Tyson (no relation to Ava above), was accused of inappropriate online conduct with minors and was removed from the channel.
Jimmy's response to most of these has been the same: a statement, an investigation, a quiet operational change, and back to the videos. Critics say it's not enough. Defenders say it's more than most companies do. Both are partly right.
The most-watched human alive
However you feel about giveaway videos, the numbers are not really arguable. As of 2025, MrBeast was the most-subscribed channel on YouTube and probably the most-watched human alive in any given week. He's worth somewhere between $500 million and a billion. He's 26.
What he proved — and you can like or dislike the proof — is that YouTube isn't a hobby that occasionally turns into a business. It's a platform where the right operator, with enough patience and the right obsessive attention to data, can build a media company that competes with Netflix. He's the first person to do it cleanly. He won't be the last.
Sources include interviews in Time, Rolling Stone, the Joe Rogan podcast, and Jimmy's own appearances on Lex Fridman's show.