MrBeast grows assets but he’s still hungry for cash

MrBeast is not your typical billionaire. For starters, unlike many of his fellow mega rich, the 27-year-old Jimmy Donaldson (his real name) is both young and wildly popular. His videos, which typically feature people doing unusual challenges to win prizes, have made him the most popular content creator on YouTube, with more than 458 million (mostly) young subscribers, and third on TikTok, with 123 million followers. In 2023, Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

More typically of a billionaire, he is a gifted entrepreneur, blessed with beastly animal spirits. He has built Beast Industries into a conglomerate with businesses ranging from lunch snacks, chocolate bars and virtual restaurants to an ad-supported TV channel and a challenge-based Beast Land pop-up theme park that was recently a hit in Riyadh. Last week he sold a $200m stake in Beast Industries in a deal that valued the business at $5bn.

The buyer, BitMine, a cryptocurrency mining and treasury company which hitherto invested only in bitcoin and ethereum, seems a slightly odd partner for MrBeast, who could probably have taken his pick of blue-chip investors keen to be cool by association. Still, when you are sitting on a large pile of digital money whose value could vanish in a moment, using some of it to buy real assets, such as shares in a proven content business, has obvious attractions. Presumably BitMine paid MrBeast a generous price.

Like more billionaires than you might think, MrBeast is asset rich but cash poor, with a big fortune on paper but not so much in the bank. “I’m borrowing money. That’s how little money I have,” he recently told the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps this deal is the start of changing that.

Photograph by Cory Osborne/Prime