Picture frames, mattresses, a door, other household debris—oh look, a discarded flowerpot—litter the front yard of a Greenville, N.C., mansion one March afternoon. Inside, jelly and barbecue sauce are splashed all over the rug. One of the back windows is cracked. Eleven college-age men are living here, participating in a challenge hosted by MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson. 

Donaldson, who turns 28 in May, is the most popular You­Tuber on the planet, with over 650 million subscribers across his channels. His games often involve contestants, or Beast himself, trapped in weird places for long periods of time competing for cash payouts of up to eight figures. These guys had all crowed on social media that Donaldson’s contests are far too easy. So he stuck them in this house, and incentivized them to make each other’s lives a living hell. 

Thus, the mustard tossed across the kitchen. Cameras observe the men 24/7. It’s day eight of the competition, and four people have already exited the premises. The last man standing keeps the residence, which is worth $1 million. A sweet prize, though by the end of their stay, renovations could cost about that much. 

Odds are that millions upon millions of people will eventually watch what unfolds in an edited 30-­minute clip on YouTube. Donaldson, who has popped by to film a check-in with the contestants, surveys the chaos. “The real winners,” he quips in the excitable, high-­volume voice he uses both on and off camera, “are the people who have left already.” 

Such spectacles are now part and parcel of an operationalized media empire, firing in all sorts of directions. Since early 2024, MrBeast’s subscriber and follower count across social media has more than doubled, to over 900 million. Across his hometown of Greenville, the out-of-the-way North Carolina city where Donaldson has headquartered his company, another 70 or so people are trapped, of their own volition, in a grocery store, the wilderness, or one of the studios Donaldson has built on his sprawling corporate campus. They too are seeking to win big prizes in a MrBeast challenge. Donaldson keeps tabs on these projects, and many more, in what is a typical workday for a man who could be building the most formidable media business to emerge this decade and beyond. 

Donaldson’s is a uniquely 21st century story: a junior-­college dropout who started making videos as an adolescent, grew an astronomical audience (“He is the canonical You­Tuber,” says YouTube CEO Neal Mohan), and is now leveraging that fame to craft a burgeoning portfolio that includes a snack line, TV show, theme park, and financial platform, with other projects in the offing. Donaldson has helped pave a lucrative career path for YouTubers and can be considered a godfather of the creator economy. 

As Beast Industries grew from some kid upload­ing Minecraft videos to a conglomerate that now employs around 750 people and is valued north of $5 billion, it made its share of missteps. But a couple of years ago, Donaldson brought on an experienced CEO to help mature and structure his business. Tales of creative talent clashing with the suits crowd business-­school libraries the world over. But if this partnership can thrive long-term, and Beast Industries can toe the fine line of diversifying its ambitions while avoiding the trappings of overexpansion—all while keeping its core offering, the YouTube shows and shorts, compelling to younger generations—his team might be right to position Donaldson as the next Walt Disney. 

Can a goofball YouTuber really stretch his influence that far? Donaldson plans to test the case. He sat with TIME for an hour-plus interview in the basketball facility he built on the 132-acre campus, where, less than two months earlier, he had invited a group of billionaires and entrepreneurs to play hoops and let him pick their brains. I ask him: What is your most ambitious plan? “Honestly, we have enough on the plate now, and I don’t want people to think I’m deranged,” says Donaldson, wearing a gray long-sleeve manga T-shirt. “There really is no limit. And if I said some of the things I would want to do 10, 20 years from now, they’d be like, ‘This guy is f-cking crazy.’”

After his mansion visit—“I’ll die before I leave,” swore one contestant—Donaldson drives his white SUV through severe winds. Five twisters ripped through three counties south of Greenville that afternoon, and a traffic light dangles close to the car. “Maybe we’ll get a little tornado,” says Donaldson. “Tornado ­videos do really well on YouTube.” 

He arrives safely at a Walmart Supercenter, where he’ll give away Nintendo Switch game systems (of course on camera, always on camera) because his chocolate and candy brand, Feastables, is selling a limited-­edition snack tied to the new Super Mario Galaxy Movie. When Donaldson, who is 6 ft. 4 in., enters the store, a commotion ensues. Workers tell a 60-year-old woman that the tall guy is MrBeast, and she goes running after him for a photo. Her 12-year-old grandson talks about MrBeast all ... the ... time. “He’s not going to believe I got this picture,” she says. “I’m telling you, he’s not going to believe it.” 

At this point, Donaldson is one of the most recognizable people on the planet. In February, for example, he developed and starred in a Super Bowl spot for Salesforce, challenging viewers to solve puzzles for $1 million with the help of an AI agent built into the chat platform Slack (Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce, which owns Slack, is TIME’s co-chair and owner). Beast Industries is transforming Greenville (pop. approximately 95,000), with housing and other economic development projects popping up to meet demand for Donaldson’s ballooning workforce. “He changed the trajectory of our future, and it’s much brighter with him here,” says Josh Lewis, president and CEO of Invest Greenville. Students at nearby East Carolina University provide a talent pipeline for the company: about 80% of the company’s seasonal and part-time employees are East Carolina students or alums—some have gone on to get full-time gigs. 

Donaldson got his stage name as a child: his XBox Live account randomly generated “MrBeast 6000.” He uploaded his first MrBeast YouTube video—titled “Worst Minecraft Saw Trap Ever???”—when he was 13; Donaldson was obsessed with watching YouTube clips and felt driven to build his own following. His breakout viral hit, a 2017 video in which he counted to 100,000, got 33 million views. He began monetizing his growing audience and giving away a portion of the haul on video. He discovered that the platform’s algorithm rewarded cash handouts; viewers found them compelling, and Donaldson enjoyed the giveaways. Six months later, he uploaded a video in which he gifted $10,000 to a homeless man. Such unique stunts made him even more popular, and while critics questioned his sincerity—Donaldson no doubt relished the views—he’s maintained a philanthropic bent: Beast Industries says that, among other charitable contributions, Donaldson has helped people in need gain access to prosthetics, surgeries, refugee aid, and school supplies, while funding the construction or renovation of schools and water infrastructure in Africa, South America, and Asia. He’s helped raised more than $90 million to plant trees, remove ocean trash, and provide clean water access worldwide, and in ­November 2025, Beast Philanthropy partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation for a campaign to inspire charitable habits among young people. 

From late 2018 through late 2022, MrBeast’s main-channel subscriber count skyrocketed from under 10 million to more than 110 million. “There are ­moments when it almost feels like it’s vertical growth,” says Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School professor who has taught a MrBeast case study in her course since 2023. The outlandish viral stunts escalated, like when he buried himself alive for 50 hours inside a coffin. As his following and revenues soared, Donaldson’s productions grew more elaborate. He capitalized on the popularity of the Netflix hit scripted drama Squid Games to recreate his unscripted version of the show on YouTube, with 456 contestants—which mimicked the 456 people who fought to the death in Squid Game—battling for a $456,000 cash prize. That 26-minute clip, which cost some $4 million to produce, has more than 915 million views on YouTube and helped launch Donaldson’s reality-show sensibilities onto episodic television. Season 1 of Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants participated in a series of challenges—like block stacking and monster-truck pulling, for a prize of $10 million—was released on Amazon Prime Video in December 2024. It debuted as the most-­watched unscripted series premiere in the streamer’s history, drawing over 50 million viewers in the first 25 days. Season 2 debuted last year as No. 1 in the U.S., and production on Season 3 is slated to begin soon. 

But there have been growing pains. Public accusations of workplace toxicity and questionable hiring practices dogged the company. Beast Industries hired law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to conduct a third-party investigation, which, in November 2024, found “several isolated incidents of workplace harassment and misconduct,” but noted that the company took “swift and appropriate actions” to address the situations. It also cleared Beast Industries of “knowingly employing individuals with proclivities or histories toward illegal or questionable legal conduct.”

“I’ve done more in the first 27 years of my life than most people do in 20 lifetimes,” says Donaldson. “Am I perfect? No. Have I messed up here and there? Of course. But I would just say, overarchingly, we try to do the right thing, and we try to do things that are net positive for humanity. And if I make a mistake, I fix it. At least I try to fix it. You could pick anyone in the world at my position who is doing a lot of things, and you can cherry-pick, ‘Oh, they did this thing wrong or that thing wrong.’ But I think overarchingly, the track record speaks for itself.” 

In September 2024, five unnamed contestants from the first Beast Games season filed a class-action lawsuit against Donaldson’s company and Amazon, alleging that they had inadequate access to food, hygienic products, and medical care during their participation on the show. The suit also claimed the defendants “created, permitted to exist, and fostered a culture and pattern and practice of sexual harass­ment” and failed to pay them minimum wage. “It’s just so bogus, it’s ridiculous,” says Donaldson. “Past that point, my lawyer will kill me if I keep talking about it.” An Amazon press rep declined to comment. “This is a serious, ongoing litigation, and out of respect for our clients and the integrity of the proceedings, we are not commenting at this stage,” says an attorney for the plaintiffs. In April, the company was hit with another civil suit: an ex-employee has accused the company of wrongful termination and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Beast Industries denies the charges.  

Donaldson knew he needed help. In the spring of 2024, one of the company’s investors introduced him to Jeff Housenbold, the former CEO of Shutterfly, who grew the digital image-­sharing company into a billion-­dollar operation. In their first Zoom meeting, Donaldson offered Housenbold the Gen Z seal of approval. “Jimmy said to me, ‘You know, bro, for 55 you’re not so cringe,’” says Housenbold. 

Housenbold flew to Greenville to shadow Donaldson. While he found Beast Industries’ potential intriguing, the mom-and-pop nature of the company gave him pause. Donaldson still had family and friends working in prominent positions. The company could never scale, Housenbold thought, without a major institutional overhaul. 

But Donaldson called and texted Housenbold more than 10 times over three days to persuade him to join; he became CEO in September 2024. Housenbold created an anonymous tip line for HR complaints. Budgets were no longer theoretical. Cost-­containment measures, like consolidating software licenses and reusing expensive sets rather than continually tearing them down, were put in place. Housenbold says that the company has cut more than $100 million in operating expenses in the past 14 months, while increasing top-line revenue growth by 50% over a two-year period. He’s plucked employees from companies like Uber, Google, and Facebook to professionalize the place. Veteran executive Corie Henson, who previously ran reality TV and game shows at NBC­Universal, joined in October 2025 as president of Beast Industry Studios, overseeing the YouTube channels and Beast Games. Housenbold says the company lost $500 million over the past five years, but expects to turn a profit for the first time in 2026. 

“In the past I’d be like, ‘Oh, this is the way to do it. No, fail, fail, fail.’ Come to the right conclusion,” says Donaldson. “Now I just skip the failures.”

Housenbold pitches Beast Industries as a diversified media, entertainment, and consumer-­products company. In other words, a modern-day Disney. But in Housenbold’s telling, Donaldson plays the role of both Walt Disney, the visionary founder, and Mickey Mouse, the front-facing character. “It really is the only way to describe it,” says Donaldson. “Brad Pitt doesn’t own the studios and fund the ideas and write the ideas and come up with the ideas and improve everything of every show and movie he’s in. That’s the world I live in.”

Beast Industries, however, doesn’t have a Donald Duck or a Star Wars franchise or the Avengers. ­Donaldson’s ensemble of friends—“the boys”—are well-known among the Beast faithful. “But I don’t think they’re going to be the ones running the other channels that we’re gonna be building,” says Donaldson. A key priority for Beast Industries is bringing up-and-­coming creators into its fold and building robust You­Tube offerings around their talents.

They’ll just have to sweat as much as he does. “I’m not competing with anyone,” says Donaldson. “Any You­Tuber in the world can call me and I’ll tell them everything I know, because it doesn’t matter. They’re not going to do it. I’m basically working 15, 16 hours every single day. We reinvest almost all the money into more content. Most people, after they make a few million dollars, just get soft and slow down.” 

Like its North Star, Beast Industries launched a theme park. A pop-up Beast Land opened for 45 days in November 2025 in Riyadh, and featured roller coasters and games like launching balls from catapults. Housenbold says the park turned a profit; Donaldson anticipates a permanent theme park at some point. He makes no apologies for testing the concept in Saudi Arabia, a country with a checkered human-rights record. “I’m sure you could take any country in the world and find something negative,” says Donaldson. “Even look at America right now. I’m sure people would have tons of things to say about [it]. Am I not allowed to do business here?”

Beast Industries’ recent acquisition of Step, a financial-­services app geared toward teens and young adults learning to manage their money, has captured the attention of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. In March, Warren wrote a letter to Donaldson and Housenbold expressing concern about Step’s prior marketing of cryptocurrency to kids and the company’s partnership with Evolve Bank & Trust. That bank was entangled with Synapse, a financial intermediary whose 2024 collapse caused up to an estimated $96 million of customer deposits to go missing at Evolve and other banks. Warren requested more information on Beast Industries’ plans for Step; the company responded on April 6. 

“Senator Warren has a history of sending a lot of letters,” says Housenbold. “It’s not my first letter from Senator Warren in my life.” In January, Beast Industries received a $200 million investment from blockchain-­technology company Bitmine Immersion Technologies, and Housenbold said Step could offer crypto ETFs (exchange-­traded funds) as an investment option for teens—with parental sign-off—as well as more traditional products like stocks and bonds. “We want to build a full-­service offering, from checking to student loans to insurance to brokerage, to be able to help people have better outcomes in life,” says Housenbold. While Evolve is still Step’s charter bank, “we are actively working on plan B,” says Housen­bold. “But everyone’s money is safe and secured.”

Other projects in the pipeline: teaming up with one of the big three mobile providers—Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T—on a MrBeast-­branded phone plan, and a book collaboration with James Patterson, which Donaldson hopes gets young people reading. “It could be that aha moment that I had where it’s like, ‘Oh, books don’t suck,’” says Donaldson, a fan of Walter Isaacson biographies. “‘Just certain books do.’” And expect him to add a YouTube food channel. 

Donaldson seems likely to call on Wall Street to fund his aspirations. He’s eyeing a Beast IPO in the not-so-­distant future. “I want to build a really large company, and that just requires a lot of money,” he says. “That would be a great way to get it so we can just go crazy.”

MrBeast also has a personal project: getting married. Donaldson and his fiancée Thea Booysen, who have been together since 2022, plan to wed later this year. “It might sound cheesy, but I'm really excited to see her in a wedding dress,” says Donaldson. “We don't really dress up that much just because we're either working or we're just tired at home, and so it'll be really cool to just see her all done up and see how pretty she looks.” Booysen, a streamer and author from South Africa who holds an undergraduate degree in law, honors degree in psychology, and a master’s in neuro­psychology, often travels with Donaldson on overseas trips while working remotely as a neuroscience researcher. “I think it is quite possible for us to incorporate a little child into the world,” she says. “Anything important is worth sacrificing a little bit for. I think it's definitely on our agenda at some point after we get married.” 

Will Donaldson, who usually films all but a handful of days in any given month, cut back his schedule to strike a better work-life balance? “Hell no,” he says. “We’re going to go faster.” (Walt Disney also had a fierce ethic—a 1954 TIME profile said Disney “works at least 14 hours a day [and] never takes a vacation.”) In her seven months as president of Beast Industry Studios, Henson has noticed Donaldson growing more patient and fine-tuning his sense of when employees need encouragement. Still, “he’s f-cking relentless,” says Henson. “He is all day, all night. He expects greatness and he expects commitment, but it’s nothing that he’s not doing himself.” 

Henson appreciates this approach. “I’d much rather work for someone who tells me like it is at midnight than someone who stabs me in the back in broad daylight,” she says. “I’ve worked for the latter.”

At the basketball court, I ask Donaldson what he’d like to improve about himself. “I definitely want to keep increasing my mental toughness,” he says. “Sometimes we’ll film really late and I just won’t want to work out, or I won’t want to do a certain thing. It seems to hit me after four or five really long days in a row. If you’re diligent about it, you can really train these kinds of things.” 

He really wants to lift weights consistently. “I couldn't care less about running,” he says. “I just want big muscles. Everything else is pointless.” Donaldson dribbles the ball and launches it at the hoop. Nothing but air. He blames yesterday’s workout. His triceps are still fried. 

“We’re not losing steam over here,” says Donaldson. “I really want to reinvent things. I want to push things further than we ever have. Every time you watch a Beast video, I want you to know that we poured everything we had into it. I don’t take your attention for granted.”

MrBeast exits the arena, off to another afternoon shoot.