“The idea is that he will be strapped to this,” says Kyle Bennett, pointing to a contraption that looks alarmingly like the bed in a lethal-injection chamber. “And we have a glass case that’s gonna go over the top and we have 1,000 spiders that are about the size of my palm that are going to cover him, and I’m personally testing this tomorrow …” He stops and looks around, but the producer has lost his audience. Jimmy Donaldson, the 25-year-old video wizard better known around the globe as MrBeast, has quietly left the room. “Classic,” says Bennett.

Donaldson is supposed to be showing a reporter and a film crew of one around the set for the next in his series of wildly popular videos of improbable stunts. In this one, a contestant must face six of his worst fears to win $800,000, hence the spiders. Elsewhere on the set is a chest of snakes, and somewhere outside there’s a car full of money that’s going to be pushed into a lake. But Donaldson’s not happy. He has been away on another shoot for 11 days, and he’s not thrilled with the progress of this one. “I’m not really good at these things,” says the world’s most successful YouTuber.

If “these things” are crowd-pleasing diversions, then Donaldson is really, really good at them. A recent video in which he and his posse of besties go on a vacation and spend $1 to $250,000 per day garnered 52 million views in 24 hours. That’s 20 times the number of people who watched the Succession finale and more than twice as many people as saw Barbie or Oppenheimer during opening weekend. His most popular video, a version of the Korean TV show Squid Game, has been seen half a billion times. While few people over the age of 30 have heard of him—unless they have kids—Donaldson is probably the most watched person on earth.

MrBeast videos could best be described as stuff an imaginative 9-year-old boy would try if he had, like, a gazillion dollars. Donaldson crushes expensive cars, gives strangers life-­changing amounts of money, holds contests to see who can do a dumb thing the longest. In 2023 alone these videos gained him 99 million new YouTube subscribers, almost double the growth of any other channel. And, in the way of most influencers, he spans all of social media, with about 100 million followers on TikTok, 50 million on Instagram—over 425 million fans in total. He estimates he appears on a screen somewhere in the world about 30 billion times a year. “At this point we kind of know what does well,” says Donaldson. “I can make almost anything go viral.”

In the flesh, Donaldson is a 6-ft. 4-in. mixture of eagerness to please and odd detachment. As we sit in his mother’s office on the second floor of his 63,000-sq.-ft. studio on the outskirts of Greenville, N.C., he keeps offering “context for listeners” to the recording device, no matter that this is a print interview. Asked how he dealt with being buried alive for seven days—in which time he openly wept more than once—he brushes off the difficulty. “Maybe for people who are extroverts it might be harder,” he says, “but there’s at least a million different things I need to think about and process mentally.” These things included how to make his videos better, how a fly that was trapped with him behaved, and whether he was using an “optimal” moisturizer.

Donaldson’s swift rise has been spurred by massive changes in the media landscape where individuals have replaced institutions as the gatekeepers of entertainment and information. He’s proved an adroit Pied Piper, figuring out how to work the YouTube algorithm to hook and keep a crowd. But he’s also disrupting the new ecosystem, showing what’s possible, even far from Hollywood, with a gigantic following. The ethos of doing things differently, of growing quickly and exponentially, has sparked concern among some about the company’s safety and labor practices. For now, though, the question seems less whether Donaldson will get where he wants to go than where he’s going—what the world he is helping shape will look like.

His sway has grown such that in 2022 he launched a line of snacks, Feastables, that by 2023 was in multiple countries and will have, according to him, $500 million in annual revenue this year. Stars the wattage of Tom Brady and Justin Timberlake now appear in his videos, and the Charlotte Hornets wear a Feastables patch on their shirts. And while he models his career on Steve Jobs, he has a little Melinda French Gates in him too. On a second channel, Beast Philanthropy, he performs outlandish tricks of the charitable sort: rescuing 100 unwanted dogs, giving away 20,000 shoes, helping distribute $30 million worth of food that was going to waste. In December 2020, he started a food-­delivery service, MrBeast Burger. It grew to a reported 1,700 virtual locations and $100 million in total revenue by August 2022, before becoming ensnared in a legal battle. He also has a toy deal and is reportedly on the verge of signing a nine-figure deal with Amazon.

Most social media influencers reach a certain level and burn out, or run out of money or ideas. Donaldson, who has been on YouTube for 12 years, has grown his channel almost exclusively on wholesome fare and has so far proved that his stamina and discipline match his ambition. Ask him how he thinks he got so successful and he has a simple answer: he just worked harder than anyone else. “It’s a never-ending treadmill for the content obviously,” says Donaldson. “It’s brutal. You’re always on, and it’s a lot of pressure. And this whole system is based around 200 million people just magically showing up and watching my next video.”

Donaldson is not your usual entrepreneur. For one, he’s happy to talk about how much revenue he brings in: about $600 million to $700 million a year. For two, he claims to not be rich. “I mean, not right now,” he clarifies. “I’m not naive; maybe one day. But right now, whatever we make, we reinvest.” He spends lavishly on every video, sometimes shooting as much as 12,000 hours of footage for a 15-minute clip. “Each video does a couple million in ad revenue, a couple million in brand deals,” says Donaldson. “I’ve reinvested everything to the point of—you could claim—stupidity, just believing that we would succeed. And it’s worked out.”

Most of his videos are made from the ground up. He rarely reuses sets and is always in search of new things to demolish. He and his creative team change tack right up until the last minute, and he admits they make expensive mistakes. “We had an hour to come up with, like, 100 ideas,” says Steffie Solomon, a stand-up comedian who worked remotely on MrBeast’s TikTok channel for a year in 2022. It took her a while to get used to how big the budgets were. “Nothing I pitched was too crazy or unfathomable,” she says.

While a steady stream of crazy adventures is Donaldson’s main gimmick, he also keeps viewers engaged by allowing them to feel part of his success. At his say-so, 20 million trees were planted and more than 600,000 people donated enough money, mostly in $5 increments, to help remove 30 million lb. of trash from the oceans. “You always feel like you’re in on his project, that you’re rooting for him,” says Quynh Mai, the CEO of Qulture, a digital-­advertising agency. In contrast to the feats he performs, the challenges Donaldson makes to others are not extreme, especially compared with the rewards. “Anyone can hold their hand on a Lamborghini for days,” says Mai, of one of the tests. “His whole perspective is, how do I make the average person extraordinary?”

#MrBeast #MostWatchPerson #YoutubeChannel