Jimmy Donaldson, the world’s most successful YouTuber, is playing the long gameBy Belinda Luscombe
—With reporting by JULIA ZORTHIAN
“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 man is being paid $500,000 to face his 10 worst fears, 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
