MrBeast American YouTuber With 421M Subscribers

Early life

MrBeast, whose birth name is James Stephen Donaldson and who is also called Jimmy, was born on 7 May 1998 in Wichita, Kansas. He grew up mainly in Greenville, North Carolina, and finished high school there at Greenville Christian Academy in 2016, where he played baseball as an outfielder. In February 2012, at thirteen, he posted his first video under the username MrBeast6000. The early channel mixed gameplay recordings of Minecraft and Call of Duty: Black Ops II with videos estimating the earnings of other YouTubers, advice for people hoping to grow a channel, and commentary on platform news.

Career

His audience grew slowly at first. A series poking fun at weak video introductions, titled "Worst Intros on YouTube", ran from 2015 to 2018 and helped him gain attention, and by mid-2016 he had roughly 30,000 subscribers. In late 2016 he left college to work on YouTube full time and brought several childhood friends onto the team as the channel grew.

His breakthrough came on 9 January 2017 with a video of himself counting to 100,000, which took about forty hours to record. Stunt videos followed, among them an attempt to break glass with a hundred megaphones and another to stay underwater for a day. In June 2017 he signed his first brand deal, with the collectibles app Quidd, and used the sponsor's fee of $10,000 for his first charitable video, giving the whole amount to a homeless man. By 2018 he had given away about $1 million through his videos. That year he also took part in the subscriber race between PewDiePie and T-Series, buying billboards and broadcast advertising in support of PewDiePie.

Large competitions became a regular format. In 2019 he staged a real-life battle royale in Los Angeles with $200,000 in prizes, in cooperation with Apex Legends. In April 2020 he ran a $250,000 rock, paper, scissors tournament with 32 influencers, which became the most-watched live original on YouTube at that time. In November 2021 he released "$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!", in which 456 people competed for a cash prize, and the video drew more than 130 million views within a week.

The subscriber milestones on his main channel came quickly. He passed 100 million subscribers on 28 July 2022, 200 million on 15 October 2023 and 300 million on 10 July 2024, becoming the first YouTuber to reach that figure. On 2 June 2024 his channel overtook T-Series as the most subscribed on the platform. He reached 400 million on 1 June 2025 and 500 million on 12 June 2026. In November 2022 Guinness World Records listed him for the most subscribers for an individual male on YouTube.

Outside the main channel he created or co-founded several businesses and series. MrBeast Burger launched in December 2020 as a delivery-only restaurant brand. The chocolate brand Feastables followed in January 2022, and the snack-kit brand Lunchly in September 2024, developed with Olajide "KSI" Olatunji and Logan Paul. His reality competition Beast Games began streaming on Prime Video on 19 December 2024, with 1,000 contestants competing for a $5 million prize. He founded the company Beast Industries and collaborated with James Patterson on the thriller The Most Dangerous Games, published in 2026.

Public roles

Philanthropy is a large part of his public work. In October 2019 he and fellow YouTuber Mark Rober launched Team Trees, a campaign for the Arbor Day Foundation that passed its $20 million target before the end of that year and had funded more than 24.8 million trees by June 2025. Team Seas, launched in October 2021 for Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup, raised more than $34 million. In August 2025 the two started Team Water for WaterAid, with donations exceeding $41 million by September 2025. In September 2020 he started the Beast Philanthropy channel, which states that it donates its advertising revenue, brand deals and merchandise income to charity.

Recognition

The records list five awards won by MrBeast: the YouTube Silver Play Button in 2016, the Gold Play Button in 2017, the Diamond Play Button in 2018, a Custom Play Button in 2021, and a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021. He also won Creator of the Year at the Streamy Awards in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, and Favorite Male Creator at the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023.