- MrBeast, YouTube's biggest creator, doesn't consider himself rich.
- Despite having huge ad revenue and brand deals, he says he is not wealthy because of his reinvestment strategy.
- He also cannot access his bank account. His mother has access.
MrBeast doesn't consider himself rich.
The YouTuber, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is the platform's biggest creator with 239 million subscribers. But that doesn't mean he's pocketing the cash he makes from videos that regularly rack up hundreds of millions of views.
With massive advertising revenue and brand deals, Donaldson has the resources to do just about anything he wants. And his choice is to reinvest it all into his own content, he told Time magazine in a recent profile interview.
Mr. Donaldson told the outlet that his annual income is between $600 million and $700 million. He recently made $250,000 from an old video he reposted on X, months after CEO Elon Musk tried to recruit him to the platform.
But Donaldson insists he is not wealthy.
“I mean, that's not the case right now,” he told the media. “I'm not naive. I might be one day. But right now, we reinvest whatever we make.”
Donaldson, 25, said he doesn't even have access to his own bank account and that his mother is “the one who has access to the master bank account.”
Every video makes “millions” from advertising and “millions from brand deals,” he told Time magazine. But it all leads to more creation.
He also said that the costs can be significant, with 12,000 hours of footage sometimes taken to create just 15 minutes of video.
In 2022, Donaldson said he was spending $8 million a month on his videos, totaling nearly $100 million a year, and his stunts have only gotten more ambitious and expensive since then.
His latest videos include being buried alive for seven days, building 100 wells in Africa, and shredding a Lamborghini.
“I believed I would be successful and reinvested everything until I was foolish enough to say so,” he told Time magazine. “And it worked.”
