MrBeast – Jimmy Donaldson
World records broken. Large explosions. Pushing people to their limits. All of these define Jimmy Donaldson and his brand, MrBeast.
Jimmy Donaldson, born in Wichita, Kansas in 1998, to two military parents who often left him in the care of an au pair. He lived in Greenville, North Carolina and attended a local Christian private school, where he played outfield on their baseball team. However, his collegiate life was not quite as provincial. After attending Pitt Community College, he met several people who would later become regular faces on the MrBeast channel. His obsession with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would lead Jimmy to drop out of community college and study YouTube’s algorithm with his college friends to a fault. Donaldson was quoted saying, “There’s a five-year point in my life where I was just relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm. I woke up. I would order Uber Eats food. And then I would just sit on my computer all day just studying…nonstop”.
But it paid off. In his early teens, Donaldson had created a YouTube channel titled, “MrBeast6000”, and had accumulated as many as thirty thousand subscribers due to his derogatory commentary on other YouTubers’ introduction videos and his video playthroughs of popular video games like Call of Duty. By 2016, he recalled wanting to make YouTube a full-time career, and dropped out of college with his friends, Ava Kris Tyson, Chandler Hallow, Garrett Ronalds, and Jake Franklin. His mother was reportedly not a fan of this revenue avenue and kicked Donaldson out of his longtime family home.
However, in January of 2017, the MrBeast6000 channel got a new, 24-hour-long video titled, “I count to 100,000”, where Donaldson could be seen counting from 1 to 100,000 for 40 hours, sped up in certain “unentertaining” portions to reach the 24-hour ceiling that YouTube had placed on videos. This particular video launched his career even quicker, allowing him to post stunt videos that involved dangerous scenarios that appealed to a primarily male audience, YouTube’s majority client base. As advertisement revenue grew and grew, so did his philanthropy. He would have several of his employees and friends compete to win a desirable prize, such as a boat, a house, or a pool, earning him the title, “YouTube’s biggest philanthropist.”
At this point, Donaldson’s college humor and reckless spending had earned him a spot in common language, and he foreshortened his YouTube handle to just, “MrBeast”. He launched several other channels such as “MrBeast Gaming”, a primarily livestream-oriented channel to continue with the gaming aspect of 2016, and “MrBeast Reacts”, a channel dedicated to watching short-form content through the pandemic, both of which continued to build Donaldson’s net worth.
Several large videos were created with reference to current pop culture, such as, “YouTube Rewind 2020: Thank God It’s Over”, and “Squid Games in real life for $456,000”. These videos skyrocketed in popularity, helping the main MrBeast channel to reach 112 million subscribers, the most a solitary YouTuber had achieved, but he kept going. Through key endorsements by sporting world legends like Serena Williams and Stephen Curry, he reached over 270 million subscribers, enough to pass an India-based group known as T-Series, and finally became the most subscribed channel of all time.
Now, Jimmy Donaldson’s channel has over 400 million subscribers, and has expanded into different industries like food service and packaged, prepared meals that have netted him a hefty sum, contributing to his status as one of the greatest Gen Z Entrepreneurs of all time.
