THE KING OF YOUTUBE

His videos are like the crazed imaginings of an 11-year-old boy. But is Jimmy Donaldson (AKA MrBeast) merely clickbait savvy - or an avant garde genius?

- By Mark O'Connell

immy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers - equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It's close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast's videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don't have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous.

Those 400 million are people who have made the choice to click that subscribe button, to ensure that they will a) not miss his latest videos and b) can be literally counted by potential advertisers as a more-or-less guaranteed audience. One last numerical fact: his 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5m, the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly cost $100m to produce, making it the most expensive unscripted show in history. Jimmy Donaldson, at the risk of belabouring the obvious, is an incredibly big deal.

And that's without even getting into his various subsidiary business interests - the mobile gaming company, the Feastables confectionery brand, the widely derided Lunchly range of ready-made kids' lunches, the MrBeast Burger fast food delivery concern, the cryptocurrency schemes, the financial services, the accredited university courses on YouTube content creation, the streaming TV network and the various philanthropic operations that bear his imprimatur.