Jimmy Donaldson would like you to call him Jimmy. If you are over the age of 10, at least.
Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is the most followed person on the internet, with billions of viewers and a company, Beast Industries, valued at $5.2 billion.
He started making videos at 11, spent his teenage years studying why some content got millions of views while other videos got almost none, and spent a period pretending to attend community college while secretly working on his channel in his car. When he finally made enough money to move out of his mother's house, the career she had told him to abandon was already paying more than hers.
That backstory is now part of the brand. So is what comes next.
The algorithm was always the point
Before MrBeast was a media empire, it was a research project. Donaldson became preoccupied as a child with a single question: why did certain videos reach millions of people while identical-looking ones got nothing? He spent years working out the answer, studying YouTube's recommendation system and the mechanics of what he calls the attention economy, where the real product is not the video but the decision a platform makes about whether to serve it to someone.
His conclusion was that the most reliable way to reach a genuinely global audience was to build content around universal human instincts rather than culturally specific references. An early example: offering a couple who had broken up four years earlier $300,000 to spend 30 days chained together. The concept requires no translation. Anyone, anywhere, understands what is at stake.
The other insight was about length. Despite widespread assumptions about shortening attention spans, the average YouTube video that performs well in the United States is getting longer, not shorter. More than 50% of YouTube watch time in the US now happens on television screens, and videos in the 25 to 30 minute range tend to do well. The global attention deficit disorder, as Donaldson describes it, applies to the hook, not the whole video. Get people in, and they will stay.
Fame has fractured
One of the more striking observations Donaldson makes is about the nature of celebrity in the algorithm era. The old model, a relatively small number of people known by nearly everyone, has given way to something more fragmented. There are now enormous online personalities, with tens of millions of devoted followers, who are essentially invisible to anyone outside their niche.
Donaldson sits at a rare intersection: broad enough to be genuinely mainstream, specific enough to have built deep loyalty. He attributes part of that to time. Trust accumulates through repeated positive interactions with an audience, and he has been building those interactions for over a decade.
Even so, he acknowledges the ceiling problem. Each video needs to be bigger, more expensive, more extreme than the last. At some point, clearing that bar becomes almost impossible. His response is to go back to first principles, adjusting the granular details of quality, editing, cameras and storytelling rather than simply escalating the spectacle. He tweeted recently that some of his newer videos had not been good enough, and announced plans to enter what he called "ultra grind mode."
Building beyond a single face
Beast Industries has three divisions. The first covers media: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Beast Games on Amazon Prime, and a growing slate of other channels and intellectual properties. The second covers consumer products, including Feastables chocolate, Mr. Beast Labs toys and Lunchly snacks. The third is newer, encompassing Beast Mobile, a phone company, and a financial services platform still in development.
Media and consumer products currently contribute roughly equal shares of revenue. The company is also building a creator marketplace designed to connect content creators with Fortune 1000 brands, offering advertisers a more efficient route into the influencer economy.
Seventy per cent of the audience is outside North America, which Donaldson and Jeff Henbald, the CEO of Beast Industries, describe as both an opportunity and a challenge. Monetising a global viewership through products and services requires infrastructure that does not yet fully exist. The company is working on it.
A potential IPO has been discussed, framed explicitly as a way to let the 1.4 billion unique viewers become part-owners of the business they helped build.
Beast Games and what went wrong
The Amazon show was, by several measures, the most ambitious thing the company has attempted. It featured the largest number of contestants in entertainment history competing for a 10 million dollar prize, the largest cash prize ever offered on a competition show, across sets that could not have been built within YouTube's economics.
The show reached number one in more than 80 countries. It also produced a wave of complaints. Contestants sued, alleging they were not treated properly, placed in dangerous situations and left without adequate food. Donaldson is candid about the failure. Season two will have fewer contestants, and the selection process will be more rigorous, aimed at finding participants who genuinely understand what they are signing up for.
The experience with streaming also confirmed something about audiences. The demographic watching Beast Games on Amazon skews older than the YouTube channel, and some of those viewers have told Donaldson they prefer the show. The core competencies, telling universally appealing stories and understanding virality, turn out to translate across formats. The company is now applying them to animation and, eventually, theme parks.
The chocolate supply chain problem
The philanthropic dimension of the MrBeast brand is real, but it is also more complicated than it looks from the outside.
When Feastables launched, the company discovered its cocoa supply chain had child labour problems. Donaldson's initial instinct was simply to pay more to avoid farms using child labour, but the investigation revealed a deeper issue: the farmers themselves were earning less than a dollar a day. Paying a premium to avoid child labour without addressing the underlying economics would not solve much.
The company now pays a living income reference price to farmers in exchange for not using child labour, and is building schools in villages where children have been removed from work but have nowhere to be educated. The stated goal is to use the platform's reach to get over a million children out of child labour, through a model that combines purchasing power, direct payments to farmers and local infrastructure investment.
Whether that ambition translates into the outcome described remains to be seen. But the structure of the problem, and the attempt to address root causes rather than symptoms, reflects the same first-principles thinking Donaldson applies to content.
What comes next
The mission statement Donaldson uses for Beast Industries is to be the most impactful entertainment brand in the world. He is careful to separate that from controversy: the company does not discuss politics, avoids content that generates division, and focuses on what he calls making kindness viral.
His influences are selective rather than singular. He takes Elon Musk's willingness to push into multiple industries simultaneously, and Steve Jobs' obsession with product quality, without trying to replicate either man wholesale.
The more relevant comparison, one Donaldson does not make explicitly but that runs through everything he describes, might be to the great media companies of the twentieth century. The ones that understood their audience better than their audience understood itself, that built distribution before they built content, and that turned attention into something durable. MrBeast started with the algorithm. Beast Industries is the attempt to build everything else around it.