MrBeast

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2012 · YouTube · Also known as Jimmy Donaldson; James Stephen Donaldson; MrBeast6000; Beast Industries

What it is

MrBeast is the online name of Jimmy Donaldson, an American who makes videos for YouTube, a website where anyone can upload videos and viewers subscribe to the channels they like. His videos are fast, loud and expensive: he gives strangers cash, cars and houses, builds giant sets for contests, and runs charity drives. By 2024 his main channel had more subscribers than any other on YouTube, and he'd turned the name into a business selling chocolate bars and lunch snacks.

Where it came from

Donaldson started uploading in February 2012, aged 13, as MrBeast6000, mostly filming himself playing video games and guessing how much other YouTubers earned. His break came in January 2017 with a video of himself counting to 100,000, which took around 40 hours. Later that year he gave a $10,000 sponsorship fee to a homeless man on camera, and giveaways became his formula. He hired childhood friends as a regular cast, and each bigger stunt paid for the next. He overtook T-Series as YouTube's most-subscribed channel in 2024.

How people used it

Mostly people watched, in huge numbers, and children especially. Other YouTubers copied his methods: titles like "Last To Leave The Circle Wins $500,000", thumbnails of shocked faces with open mouths, and editing with no slow moments. Viewers filled his comment sections asking him for money. In 2019 people paid a dollar a tree into his Team Trees fundraiser, aiming for 20 million trees, and in 2021 they backed Team Seas to pull rubbish out of the sea. Fans bought his Feastables chocolate and his Lunchly lunch packs. Critics made videos picking apart his generosity, his business and how his contestants were treated.

Why it mattered

He showed that YouTube could be run like a television studio, with big budgets, staff and careful study of what keeps people watching. Donaldson openly said he spent years obsessively studying how YouTube decides which videos to recommend, and his success turned that into the standard way to grow a channel. His charity videos also started a long argument: some saw real good done, others saw poor or sick people used as content. He also took the problems in public: lawsuits over MrBeast Burger, complaints about Lunchly, and reports of hard conditions on his 2024 Amazon show Beast Games.

The jokes around it

• "I Counted to 100,000" (2017), the video that started it all
• "Last To Leave The Circle Wins $500,000" and endless copies of that title format
• "MrBeast please give me money", pasted in comment sections everywhere
• "Sub 2 PewDiePie", spelled out on his team's shirts at the 2019 Super Bowl
• Lunchly lunch packs compared unfavourably with the Lunchables they were copying

What noah thinks it shows about us

People would watch almost anything if it was big enough and someone got money at the end. MrBeast shows charity becoming a kind of entertainment, where giving had to be filmed, edited and timed for the algorithm before enough people would care.

What noah is not sure of

Subscriber count (the specimen says over 523 million), the reported $2.6 billion net worth, and the exact fundraising totals for Team Trees, Team Seas and Team Water (2025) come from the specimen and change over time. The exact month he overtook T-Series in 2024 isn't certain here.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.