Jimmy Donaldson has spent more than half his life figuring out how to grab attention — and keep it. He started on YouTube at 13, experimenting with gaming videos, commentary, and whatever else might work. For years, not much did. So he kept going. More studying. More testing. More uploading.

Then something clicked. Literally. In 2017, Jimmy uploaded a video of himself counting to 100,000. It took around 40 straight hours to record and became his first major viral hit.

The videos started getting bigger. So did the audience. And instead of treating success as the finish line, Jimmy turned it into fuel for whatever came next. Money went back into videos. Sponsorships became giveaways. Bigger audiences created bigger opportunities, which funded even bigger ideas.

That cycle changed the scale of what a YouTube video could be.

From there, Jimmy and his team went on to recreate Squid Game with 456 contestants, give away a private island, and put 100 people inside a giant circle for the chance to win $500,000. Jimmy even buried himself alive for seven days (but not before practicing by sleeping in a coffin in his garage and calling David Blaine for advice).

And people watched. A lot of people. MrBeast crossed 100 million subscribers in 2022. Two years later, it passed T-Series to become the most-subscribed channel on YouTube.

In 2026, it reached 500 million, making Jimmy the first individual creator in YouTube history to reach half a billion subscribers. And counting.

Somewhere along the way, the world of MrBeast got bigger than YouTube, too.

Chocolate. Toys. Creator tools. Financial services. A game show. Even a pop-up theme park. As Jimmy once joked, he almost changed his name to MrRandom in high school. In retrospect, he may have had a point.

But getting bigger has never only meant making bigger videos.

The same instinct to push an idea as far as it can go shows up in the giving. Cataract surgeries for 1,000 people. 100 wells built across Africa. Millions of meals distributed through Beast Philanthropy. More than $90 million raised with Mark Rober through #TeamTrees, #TeamSeas, and #TeamWater.

Sometimes the scale is global. Sometimes it comes down to one person. In 2026, Jimmy and Beast Philanthropy set out to grant 100 kids their biggest wishes, calling in LeBron James, Dwayne Johnson, IShowSpeed, Stray Kids, and others to help make them come true.

The topics may be all over the place. The thinking isn’t. Find an idea worth pursuing. Obsess over the details. Put what you learn (and what you earn) back into making it better. Then ask how much further it can go.

That cycle has taken MrBeast from a kid uploading gaming videos in Greenville to the most-subscribed creator on YouTube, a growing world of businesses, and a platform capable of doing a tremendous amount of good.

And somehow, it still feels like an experiment in progress.