MrBeast
MrBeast (born James Stephen Donaldson; May 7, 1998) is an American YouTuber, businessman and philanthropist whose channel is the most-subscribed on YouTube. On 12 June 2026 he became the first individual creator in history to pass 500 million subscribers, a milestone confirmed by YouTube itself.[1] What started as a teenager's bedroom experiment in viral-video mechanics has grown into Beast Industries, a company valued at a reported $5 billion spanning chocolate, restaurants, analytics software and reality television.[2]
| MrBeast | |||||||||||||||||||
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 MrBeast | |||||||||||||||||||
| Personal information | |||||||||||||||||||
| Born | James Stephen Donaldson May 7, 1998 Wichita, Kansas, United States | ||||||||||||||||||
| Nationality | American | ||||||||||||||||||
| Education | Greenville Christian Academy | ||||||||||||||||||
| Occupation(s) | YouTuber, businessman | ||||||||||||||||||
| YouTube information | |||||||||||||||||||
| Channel | |||||||||||||||||||
| Also known as | MrBeast | ||||||||||||||||||
| Years active | 2012–present | ||||||||||||||||||
| Genre(s) | Challenge, philanthropy, stunt | ||||||||||||||||||
| Subscribers | 500 million+ (September 2026) | ||||||||||||||||||
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Early life and education
Jimmy Donaldson was born on 7 May 1998 in Wichita, Kansas, and was raised in Greenville, North Carolina. He graduated from Greenville Christian Academy in 2016 and briefly attended East Carolina University before leaving to focus on YouTube. Unlike most creators who stumble into success, Donaldson treated the platform as a subject to be studied — for years he cold-called other YouTubers to dissect thumbnail psychology, pacing and retention curves, building a private education in virality long before he had an audience to use it on.
Career
The grind years (2012–2017)
Donaldson created his YouTube channel in February 2012 at the age of 13. For the first half-decade it barely registered. His breakthrough came in January 2017 with "counting to 200,000", a stunt video that took about 40 hours to film and proved the thesis he had been refining for years — that spectacle taken to absurd extremes was the fastest currency on YouTube. The endurance-stunt series that followed pushed him past a million subscribers, and brand money started to arrive. Characteristically, he gave almost all of it away on camera.
Stunts, philanthropy and scale (2018–2022)
The formula that made MrBeast a global phenomenon crystallized around 2018: enormous cash prizes, punishing physical challenges, and philanthropy staged at a scale nobody had attempted. In November 2021 his recreation of Netflix's Squid Game — a $3.5 million production with 456 real contestants — became one of the most-watched YouTube videos of all time and showed a YouTuber could out-produce television. Off the main channel he kept widening his ambitions, launching the Team Trees and Team Seas fundraisers with Mark Rober, which together raised tens of millions of dollars for environmental causes. In November 2022 he passed PewDiePie to become the most-subscribed individual creator on the platform, ending a reign that had lasted nearly a decade.[3]
Beast Industries: the business empire (2022–present)
Donaldson never intended to stay just a YouTuber. In 2022 he launched Feastables, a chocolate brand that did roughly $250 million in revenue in 2024 — and, remarkably, turned a $20 million profit in a year when his media operation lost around $80 million on $246 million of revenue. The chocolate, in other words, subsidizes the videos.[4] He followed with MrBeast Burger, a virtual restaurant chain run through ghost kitchens, and Lunchly, a lunch-kit brand launched in September 2024 with Logan Paul and KSI.
The commercial scale is difficult to overstate. Court documents made public in 2026 showed he charged brands about $2.5 million for a single 30-to-45-second segment on his main channel in early 2024, with his company locking in $91 million in brand agreements for the following year.[5] In 2024 he signed a reported $100 million deal with Amazon MGM Studios for Beast Games, a reality competition series whose first season drew tens of millions of viewers.
500 million and the Google era (2026)
June 2026 brought the milestone no creator had touched: 500 million subscribers, reached on 12 June, with the channel pulling an estimated 4 to 6 billion views a month.[6] That September, Donaldson signed a multi-year global partnership with Google itself, weaving the company's Gemini AI, Google Health tools and Fitbit wearables into his stunt-driven survival videos — a deal that treats him less like an influencer and more like a media conglomerate with half a billion viewers.[7]
Personal life
Donaldson married South African creator and author Thea Booysen in July 2026 in a small, camera-free ceremony on Necker Island, Richard Branson's private Caribbean retreat. The couple, who met in 2022, kept the 70-guest wedding deliberately offline — a striking choice for a man whose empire was built on filming everything.[8]
References
- ↑ https://sqmagazine.co.uk/how-many-subscribers-does-mrbeast-have/
- ↑ https://www.ainvest.com/news/beast-industries-brand-pitch-story-masks-chocolate-company-subsidizing-losses-ipo-faces-hard-valuation-test-2607/
- ↑ https://www.techdigest.tv/2022/11/mrbeast-overtakes-pewdiepie-as-most-subscribed-youtube-creator.html
- ↑ https://www.ainvest.com/news/beast-industries-brand-pitch-story-masks-chocolate-company-subsidizing-losses-ipo-faces-hard-valuation-test-2607/
- ↑ https://qazinform.com/news/mrbeast-charged-25m-for-single-youtube-brand-deal-bd117a
- ↑ https://sqmagazine.co.uk/how-many-subscribers-does-mrbeast-have/
- ↑ https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/09/03/mrbeast-teams-up-with-google-for-multiyear-gemini-and-health-tools-deal-487558/
- ↑ https://fanvault.shop/blog/mrbeast-married-thea-booysen-necker-island-richard-branson-70-guests-july-2026