MrBeast

1998–present

Social media star MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, operates the most popular channel on YouTube based on subscriber numbers. Since starting his page in 2012 at age 13, the North Carolina native has built an audience of more than 394 million people on YouTube alone. Known for filming elaborate stunts, contests, and giveaways, MrBeast has used his earnings to invest in other ventures, including the food chain MrBeast Burger and the snack brand Feastables. His reality competition show, Beast Games, has been renewed for two more seasons.

FULL NAME: James Stephen Donaldson
BORN: May 7, 1998
BIRTHPLACE: Wichita, Kansas
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Before he became a social media superstar, MrBeast was born James Stephen Donaldson on May 7, 1998, in Wichita, Kansas. He is the middle child of two U.S. military veterans including his mother, Susan Parisher. Donaldson, also known by his nickname “Jimmy,” has an older brother, CJ, and a younger sister whose identity he hasn’t revealed publicly.

After Donaldson’s birth, Parisher served as a military prison warden near Mannheim, Germany, before being stationed at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. According to Rolling Stone, she often worked 12-hour days while on active duty, meaning a series of au pairs primarily cared for young Jimmy and his siblings. The family moved to three different cities by the time he was 7 years old.

Donaldson’s parents divorced in 2007, and he isn’t in contact with his father. Although he hasn’t discussed his father’s identity or the reason for their severed relationship, Parisher has claimed she experienced physical, sexual, and emotional abuse throughout her marriage. She told Rachael K. Adams of The Love Offering Podcast she finally decided to leave with her children weeks after an “almost fatal fight.”

Parisher now serves as the chief compliance officer of MrBeast LLC and manages the company’s expenditures and contracts. She also handles her son’s banking and personal affairs.

Despite the moves early in his life, Donaldson was primarily raised in Greenville, North Carolina. He has revealed relatively little about his childhood, and told Rolling Stone in April 2022 he doesn’t have any vivid memories of his life before age 11. Donaldson—who now stands 6 feet, 5 inches—played baseball and basketball throughout his youth and into high school but eventually gave up sports after being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at age 15. “I played baseball nonstop, and then when I got Crohn’s, I lost like 50 pounds. I’m like f– that,” he said during a 2022 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Because of the autoimmune disease, which causes inflammation in the digestive tract, Donaldson experiences bouts of fatigue and must keep a heavily regulated diet.

Donaldson graduated from Greenville Christian Academy in 2016 and enrolled at East Carolina University but dropped out after only two weeks. His disapproving mother kicked him out of their house. Donaldson was now fully committed to his primary passion: making YouTube videos.

According to Rolling Stone, Donaldson began posting videos to the internet at age 11. After turning 13, he started his own YouTube channel in 2012, calling himself “MrBeast6000” because the shorter “Mr. Beast” was already taken. The username later evolved into its current iteration, MrBeast.

MrBeast began his YouTube channel in 2012. Twelve years later, it had attracted more subscribers than any other account on the platform.

The teenager initially posted gaming videos of himself playing Minecraft, Call of Duty, and other titles, as well as clips with commentary about other YouTubers. He uploaded his first viral stunt in January 2017, a nearly 24-hour video of himself counting to 100,000 (in reality, it took him about 40 hours). Soon after the video, the 19-year-old reached more than 1 million subscribers.

Finding a formula for virality, MrBeast has continued to make videos featuring unusual stunts or large acts of philanthropy. These have included giving $10,000 to a homeless person as well as tipping restaurant workers with gold bars and luxury items. In September 2020, MrBeast launched a spinoff channel called Beast Philanthropy, which claims all of its ad revenue, merchandise, and sponsorship earnings go to charitable causes.

With his primary channel earning at least six figures per month by that time, MrBeast continued to make more elaborate videos that regularly featured his friends, the Beast Gang. In one of his most popular videos to date, MrBeast recreated the hit Netflix series Squid Game in November 2021, offering 456 contestants the chance to win a $456,000 grand prize. Unlike in the show, none of the eliminated contestants were harmed.

That same year, the YouTuber subjected himself to another viral stunt: spending 50 hours buried alive in a coffin equipped with food, water, air conditioning, and a walkie-talkie to communicate with his co-hosts. The clip set a YouTube record for most views accumulated in one day and now has been watched more than 331 million times.

By June 2024, MrBeast’s channel had more subscribers than any other YouTube page. As of May 2025, he has attracted around 394 million subscribers and shared eight new videos this year, bringing his total to 870. With more than 500 million followers across social media, he estimated his videos are viewed about 30 billion times around the world each year in February 2024.

Capitalizing on the growth and financial success of the channel, MrBeast has expanded his brand with a variety of food-related business projects. These include MrBeast Burger, Feastables, and Lunchly.

He started MrBeast Burger, a delivery-only food chain operating out of partner kitchens, in December 2020. According to Bon Appétit, MrBeast Burger reportedly generated more than $100 million in revenue in its first seven months. The brand’s first restaurant opened at the American Dream shopping mall in New Jersey in September 2022.

MrBeast attends the launch of MrBeast Burger at the American Dream mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in September 2022.

Feastables, a snack brand, launched in January 2022 with the release of a gluten-free chocolate bar called the MrBeast Bar. “No other brand is creating quality snacks with a focus on fun at a mass scale, and I’m excited for everyone to experience it,” MrBeast said. Now available in eight flavors, the bars are sold in retail stores such as Wal-Mart, Target, and Kroger.

More recently in October 2024, MrBeast teamed with fellow social media star Logan Paul to create Lunchly, a packaged lunch for children that includes a MrBeast Bar and Paul’s Prime Hydration sports drink. Although marketed as a healthier alternative to other lunch brands, the Lunchly kits have received a negative reaction from some consumers who discovered mold in the product prior to its expiration date.

MrBeast has expanded beyond food and YouTube into free ad-supported TV, or FAST. The Roku Channel introduced a MrBeast channel in 2023, which plays YouTube videos and encourages viewers to “join Jimmy and friends for extreme stunts, jaw-dropping challenges, entertaining esports, and philanthropic projects.”

An even bigger opportunity arrived to increase his TV presence in 2024. MrBeast teamed with Amazon Prime Video to host and executive produce Beast Games. The reality competition show pitted 1,000 contestants against one another to compete for $5 million, but by the end of the season, MrBeast had doubled the final prize and given out millions more throughout the competition. Beast Games became the most-viewed unscripted series in Prime Video’s history after it began streaming that December. Despite this, the host told The Diary of a CEO podcast that he lost “tens of millions of dollars” in the process due to the excessive nature of the show. Prizes amount more than $20 million, and MrBeast has said the total cost of the show was more than $100 million.

Watch Beast Games on Prime Video

Beyond financial losses, MrBeast found himself in legal turmoil over the competition. In September 2024, five unnamed contestants sued MrBeast and Amazon in Los Angeles Superior Court; they alleged they had experienced “chronic mistreatment” on set, including sexual harassment. According to The New York Times, contestants reported significant injuries suffered in physical challenges and several hospitalizations. MrBeast has said the claims were “blown out of proportion.” No updates about the lawsuit have been made public.

In May 2025, Amazon announced it has renewed Beast Games for two more seasons.

MrBeast revealed in a February 2024 interview with Time he makes between $600 and $700 million per year. Much of this is through ad revenue and sponsorship deals for his videos as well as merchandise sales. However, he claims he has reinvested most of his earnings into more videos and projects. “I’ve reinvested everything to the point of—you could claim—stupidity, just believing that we would succeed. And it’s worked out,” he said.

Celebrity Net Worth estimates MrBeast’s total fortune at around $1 billion, and his company is even more valuable. Axios previously reported in October 2022 that the social media star hoped to raise $150 million worth of investments for his brand, with a valuation of around $1.5 billion.

His sizable bank account came in handy during the making of Beast Games. MrBeast told The Diary of a CEO podcast the Amazon Prime Video reality competition cost more than $100 million, some of which he was on the hook for. “It was not a good financial decision to make Beast Games,” the show host said. “I lost money. I would have more money if I didn’t film it.”

Due to safety concerns as a celebrity, MrBeast moved to a gated community in Greenville, North Carolina, sometime around 2022. However, the YouTuber revealed in a March 2024 interview with Howie Mandel he now primarily lives inside a room at the MrBeast studio complex to avoid commuting. He also has his own bodyguard that accompanies him in public.

While MrBeast’s content is massively popular, it has also drawn criticism. In 2018, The Atlantic reported that MrBeast had used anti-gay slurs in social media posts when he was a teenager and used homosexuality as a joke in a number of his videos. Although at the time he said he would just “ignore” the controversy, he later attributed his comments to his staunchly religious upbringing. “This is literally the heart of the Bible Belt. I had it beat in my head every day when I was younger, like, ‘Gay people are the reason God’s going to come and burn this Earth,’” he told Rolling Stone in 2022. “As I grew up, I realized, ‘Oh, this isn’t normal. This is just a weird place I grew up in.’”

In November 2023, MrBeast released a video in which he and his team built 100 wells across Africa. He claimed the project would provide clean water for up to 500,000 people in Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. While some praised the YouTuber for the philanthropic act, other people felt the stunt was one of multiple that exploited vulnerable populations to generate attention and revenue for his channel. “I already know I’m gonna get canceled because I uploaded a video helping people, and to be 100% clear, I don’t care. I’m always going to use my channel to help people and try to inspire my audience to do the same,” he wrote on X.

A few months later in July 2024, the MrBeast channel attracted more controversy when allegations emerged that one of his co-hosts, Ava Kris Tyson, groomed a minor through online messaging several years earlier. Tyson, who came out as a transgender woman in 2023, denied the claims and apologized “for any of my past behavior or comments if it hurt or offended anyone.” MrBeast announced he had removed her from the channel (Tyson said the decision was mutual) and hired a third party to investigate. In November 2024, MrBeast shared results of the inquiry, which determined sexual misconduct allegations “between Company employees and minors” were “without basis.”

Thea Booysen and MrBeast have been dating since 2022.

MrBeast is engaged to Thea Booysen, a South African author, YouTuber, and Twitch streamer known by her channel name TheaBeasty. He proposed on Christmas Day in 2024 after the couple had been dating for more than two years. MrBeast popped the question while opening presents with Booysen and their respective families.

“My friends thought I would want to propose in a very public way, like some sort of spectacle at the Super Bowl or somewhere else really big like that, but I knew that I wanted it to be the opposite, to be really private and intimate,” MrBeast told People. The couple told the magazine they are considering a “more private” island wedding with close family and friends.

Booysen revealed in a 2022 interview the pair met through friends in South Africa. They have appeared in public together at the 2022 and 2023 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, along with the premiere of Beast Games. “On paper, it’s like, I don’t know he was written out of a book just for me. It’s the weirdest thing,” Booysen told the Wide Awake Podcast. “He wants to help change the world, I want to do that. He is focused on his career, I am very focused on what I’m doing.” 

In June 2023, MrBeast claimed he was invited on an expedition to see wreckage of the Titanic aboard the Titan submersible but declined. The OceanGate vessel imploded during a voyage to the underwater site that same month, killing all five passengers.

MrBeast has also expressed a desire to run for president of the United States after he reaches the age minimum of 35. “I think we’re due for younger presidents. I’m tired of them always being in their 70s,” he said in 2022.

• I just want to be the best, and I want to make the best content possible.
• It’s a never-ending treadmill for the content obviously. It’s brutal. You’re always on, and it’s a lot of pressure.
• I’m very forward-thinking. F–– the past. It’s already happened. I’m trying to conquer the future.

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Tyler Piccotti

News and Culture Editor, Biography.com

Tyler Piccotti joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor and is now the News and Culture Editor. He previously worked as a reporter and copy editor for a daily newspaper recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors. In his current role, he shares the true stories behind your favorite movies and TV shows and profiles rising musicians, actors, and athletes. When he's not working, you can find him at the nearest amusement park or movie theater and cheering on his favorite teams.