How Much Money MrBeast Makes | The Full Story

If he can make a three-pointer, I'll tell you how much I make off YouTube. Well, I never thought that this would happen. And no, I'm not talking about being stuck inside of a makeshift jail cell, but instead getting an inside look into the business of one of the most successful creators of all time, Mr. Beast. 96,000. 157 million views. That's why when you say, like, "Do you set aside money?" 39 days of no video and you can still do that on a side channel.

From his humble beginnings, Jimmy Donaldson was able to turn his genuine passion for making YouTube videos into a conglomerate of businesses, restaurants, charities, and investments. And today, we're getting an inside look into Forbes' highest-paid creator, allowing us to see exactly how he spends his day and his money. Enjoy!

When is the moment that you realize that you could turn this into a business?

"Probably when I started making around 20, 30,000 a month is when it kind of clicked in my head. I was just like, 'Wait a minute, if I just had a helper, I could do this two times faster. I could upload twice as much.' And so then I just brought in a guy to help me move boxes and just help with the simple stuff. And I was like, 'Oh, well now let me go hire an editor.' And then I just basically hired someone every month for the last like six years."

Yeah, so we have basically cameras for different things. As the videos have gotten crazier, we've just built up a giant arsenal of stuff.

How many hours do you work in a day?

"I would say since I was 11 years old, almost every waking hour of the day, I'm thinking of YouTube in some form or capacity. I feel like it was almost like baked in my DNA. Like it just flows in my blood—the innate urge to create videos and to build a YouTube channel and build businesses. It's just, that's just what I do. And if I like try to take time off, I just get depressed and I feel like I lose my sanity. But I also feel like I lose my sanity because we've cranked the treadmill so much on creating videos. So it's like weird, but if I'm not creating, then I don't feel fulfilled. I don't feel like I'm progressing; then I feel like I'm wasting my time."

The problem I'm having right now is I struggle to wind down at night because I just work and work, and I'll lay in bed and I'll think of ideas, and I'll think of just like, you know, what we could have done better, how we could edit a video better, or finances or whatever. So I'm trying to like actually find ways to like pull back a little bit and so I sleep a little bit better.

Hopefully, it's not too messy, so I have everything I need in here—my bed, my work computer, a little bench press to get exercise in, a toilet, and a shower. And that's my closet. I was on the cover of Rolling Stone recently, which who cares about magazines, whatever, but Steve Jobs was also on the cover of Rolling Stone. So I'm getting this blown up to be the same size as this so I can have like just matching posters of us both on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Could you walk us through a normal day?

"Next week, I'm gonna be flying to India to stay in like a one-dollar hotel and then like a ten-thousand-dollar hotel in the Maldives. And then when I get back, well that means gaming reacts, well behind, so I'm gonna have to do a whole day of catching up on our reacts videos. I'm gonna have to do a day or two catching up on our gaming videos. And then I've been gone, so now I got to spend a whole day catching up on the creative and all our other main channel videos. And then the video after that, we're gonna do like the world's largest experiments. Like we're trying to make the world's largest balloon, you know? And then the Beast Burger festivals are probably going to want my head on a platter because I just spent two weeks traveling filming that video and I haven't been talking to them as much. And then probably those meetings will probably fly into town. The main channel is the priority, and then around the main channel schedule, the rest of my life kind of like forms with all the other businesses."

Well, these are just our English channels. So then we're gonna have Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian, Japanese, Hindi, and they'll probably go down to like here. My well of knowledge needs to constantly be expanding so I have more things to draw inspiration from for our ideas. If not, you're going to get the same ideas over and over again. So it happens for a lot of creators; that's why their videos are repetitive and always the same thing because if you're not constantly learning new things, then your ideas are just limited to what's in your head and eventually you're going to drain it.

How many hours would you say it takes to edit the average video?

"So, our 100 million subscribers special, I think we were just doing the math; I think it was like collectively like 1700 hours across all the editors. The thing is, like, I'm not the easiest to work with in that regard. Like I really want to make the video as good as possible and so we'll just be like, 'Well, what if we try this?' And so we'll have to like basically re-edit the video to see if this other way produces a better story and if it flows better. It's a lot of testing, so we usually edit a video like, you know, five or seven times. Working for Jimmy is like the most particular process. If he's not completely happy with the video, then it just keeps on going for like an extra week. And well, just every single day, it's like it's a long process, but at the same time, it improves quality."

Apparently, if you make a pee joke, it will drop your attention by around five percent: no pee jokes. That's just a no-go, no matter how funny it is. I mean, I think it's funny, but it doesn't matter; it's just a no-go. Like, you can't do that; there's just no.

Do you ever take days off?

"So, I found giving in to my natural instinct works best. So I just work every day, every hour of the day, until I just burn out. Anytime I try to stick to a schedule, it just doesn't work because there are certain Saturdays I'm just fired up and like God himself couldn't stop me from going and working on a video, and then there are other Saturdays the way I'm burnt out. And so, yeah, I just, I just kind of give in to my emotions and just work when I want to."

All their walls are whiteboard paint. Yeah, so all throughout here is just all our upcoming videos. This is the box they deliver the 100 million. I'm going to be 100% honest—I had never even read it. I didn't realize it was customized for every person. Remind me to read that later; I thought it was just a copy print everyone.

Do you know how many income sources you have?

"That's an interesting one. Well, let's see; we have Beast Burger, Feastables, we have a company where we dub channels, which runs our Mr. Beast Español and stuff like that. We do that for other people. We have Mr. Beast Mississippi's Gaming, Beast Reacts, yeah, merch as another one. Honestly, I'd have to like open my bank account and look through it because there's also like sub-opportunities, like we occasionally do things where like we built this app, we had people put their finger on the outside. Yeah, so we're building other apps in the future."

What would you say your main source of income is if you were to pick one thing?

"So, I'll say this because I treat you— you can throw it up—that Beast Burger has done over 100 million in sales and obviously that number has grown a lot bigger since then. So like, but again, it's because it's something people can repeatedly buy; merch has the best margins, but you know, it's just like a burger or whatever. You know, it's something someone can order multiple times a week. Merch is only going to buy like twice a year, you know what I mean?"

What about sponsorships?

"Oh yeah, and sponsorships! Oh gosh, yeah, those have gone crazy recently. I'll tell you over under—what's the most you think I've gotten for a brand deal? Three million? Oh well, I was hoping you would say something lower. We've definitely done deals around that ballpark."

Yes, how many people work for you?

"It's definitely getting big. I'd say, in general, right between Feastables and all the stuff we're doing, like full-time salary—probably 150 people, maybe 200, just kind of depends. So a lot of like part-time jobs and second-hand jobs that are spun off, and that's where it gets into like the hundreds. But yeah, this is our studio; it's around 40,000 square feet of studio space. In America, currently, it is in very high demand; people are struggling to keep up because content creation, just in general, is growing year over year. So having a big place like this—with no beams, which is what was here when we bought them—there's like hundreds of these, which is how most warehouses are—you can't film movies, you can't film content in them. So it's very, very hard because it's expensive. It's much easier just to throw up beams to hold up the roof to find wide open space like this with none. So that's why spaces like this are pretty rare."

Do you know how much it costs in terms of running your overall business every month?

"Like on the gaming channel, we probably are spending like, I don't know, depends—like a couple hundred thousand a month. Reacts, a couple hundred thousand a month. The main channel, now probably like three or four million a month. Like Feastables is spending probably a million or so a month; Beast Burger, same thing. I mean, if you're including like marketing and stuff, a couple million a month. I mean, even like our Beast philanthropy, our charity, you know, I put a lot of money into that so we can have food and stuff like that. So yeah, it's getting pretty crazy."

Who manages that?

"Um, well if you go over there up those stairs, you'll see a little accounting team. That I walk in and I go, 'I want to give a hundred people a hundred thousand dollars.' They go, 'You're crazy,' and I'm like, 'Good luck!' And here is 10 other doors and those are the people that I stress out with money. The money is best spent in like just doing grander things that I find interesting, that are unique, original, and like for the most part, you can't find what we do anywhere else—not at the scale we do. And I think it's like that is where I want to put the money in because then that's what gets people coming back; they enjoy it and then everything else benefits."

Do they make sure that money is like put aside just for you, like just in case?

"People have been saying that since I had a million subscribers and the videos give views even if I don't upload. So, like, if I really wanted to, I could just stop spending and just live off the money—531,000. Full disclosure, it's late at night. I haven't uploaded in a while. Oh my God, when we uploaded the island video, we were doing five million an hour. So here, look at all the channels. Here's the other channels; pick any channel you want—it's 63,000 a month. Literally, all I want to do is make the best food as possible. That's why I live in the studio right over there. So I don't like—I'm not worried about paying for a mansion, I don't drive a Lamborghini. I purposely have a really, like, dumbed-down lifestyle. So when, because it gives you freedom. Like, you know, most people can't reinvest in a business because when they get to this level, they're worried about their 10 million mansion, they're like four or five cars, and insurance, and keeping up with that, and then like their second home and all these other things. I just cut it all out; I have no personal debt or like things, you know, that I have to pay for. So I can just go all in on the business because it's like it doesn't even matter, you know what I mean?"

How much do you think it costs to build an elevator?

"My guess here is probably going to be 80 grand."

"I think that was around 200,000."

Why so much?

"I thought the same thing! I was like, in my head, I was like, 'Oh, an elevator is like 20 grand.'"

How do you plan to expand the business?

"Ooh, that's where it gets fun. I think for starters, you know, I just want to keep making the best videos possible. I have to reiterate—I'm going to sound like a broken record—but everything I do stems from that because if I stop making the best videos, people stop watching, and then festivals are relevant, Beast Burgers are relevant, all the companies are just literally irrelevant. So that, and then stemming off from that, next, I really want to get into making mobile games. I think that’d be a lot of fun because we have a gaming channel that gets like 20 million views per video, and then I really want to scale up Feastables, launch new products; we're going to launch cookies. And then Beast Burger; we're getting into building physical locations. So in two weeks, we open our first physical Beast Burger. We have 2,000 virtual; rebuilding that and then based on how that goes, I want to build 10 and then 50 and then 100 physical locations. And just, you know, keep leveraging the brand. I like pushing myself, and I see it as a sport and like going hard in business and building them. Even though it's stressful and it's very difficult; and like sometimes, I'm like, you know, you have a mental breakdown, you're like, 'Why am I doing this? Why did I push myself so hard?' But then when you're not doing it, you're just depressed. So it's like a weird system, a weird situation, but I love it, but sometimes I don't."

We're gonna try to do the world's largest hydraulic press versus a Lambo, see if we can squish it. Then we're gonna do, uh, we're gonna put a rocket on a car and see how many buses he can jump over. Um, and then what's the largest elephant toothpaste? World's largest paper airplane.

What's your biggest insecurity?

"Like our videos are very fast-paced, and so sometimes you do have to give up a little bit of the story in order to keep the videos moving. Of anything, it would be that. Like, a lot of people think the only reason we get views is because I just throw money at it, and they don't realize that, you know, we spent a decade just studying what does well. Um, you know, studying, figuring out our own style, figuring out our own way to do things, and that amount of hours I put into, like, just expanding the inspiration in my brain just so I can come up with the original ideas. And the, like, the months and months we spend building the sets and working on it and the weeks we spend editing and all this. And then, you know, they're just like, 'Oh, he just spent money, that's it.' There's nothing special, you know what I mean?"

Speaking of which, yeah, you want to see where we store our money?

"Let's see! Almost every area of the internet points to YouTube, so I think YouTube's going to keep growing. It's mind-blowing, and you can leverage that to build businesses or, you know, like, do things like philanthropy or whatever. I think like people don't realize just how crazy it is for us. We have a hundred million people on average that watch almost everything we put up."

Does that ever worry you that you have that much influence on so many people?

"We did Team Trees; we do Team Seas. Typically, our stuff centers around doing good, and no, actually it excites me because I've had hundreds of parents, probably even a thousand at this point, tell me stories of like their kids watch that, and then when they get Tooth Fairy money, they want to go donate to charity or like their little 12-year-old kid wants to go volunteer because they watched the Beast philanthropy video. No, I feel like we're doing a good job in inspiring people to care, and, you know, um, yeah, maybe it could be perfect, but in general, I feel like compared to other stuff, we're doing a pretty good job."

Oh my gosh, we're about to hit one point or 103 million. That's yeah, it's hard to say.

So, I'm curious on this one: how do you balance having a relationship?

"With my current girlfriend, she's actually from South Africa, so that is the hard part because I live in my studio; I don't really ever do anything fun, and I work 99% of the time. So one thing is like I also—I’m obsessed with learning—and so it was very important I found someone that also likes learning. So she loves reading books, she loves like experiencing things. So like I don't see like taking like an art class as a waste of time because that might creatively inspire me. Or like a pottery class or even going and shooting guns or whatever, some new thing. So usually it's like us doing something like that where in my head I'm learning something and I can kind of justify the time, you know what I mean? Yeah, to my like business-obsessed brain cell. So it's that and that and it's also good to unwind, um, and you know, so you can actually go to bed at a reasonable time and not just lay there working in your head."

To be a good business owner, don't you have to know like where every penny in your company goes or something like that?

"You would think, but you know what? If you hire someone else to do that for you, then it's like, yeah, I just want to focus on making great videos. So like I'm not as like involved."

"Oh, this is pretty cool. Just the laser-like focus and obsession is just kind of what I aim to like implement in our videos because it's, yeah, it's just beautiful to see."

"Hey, you should subscribe right now. That, you know, a lot of people who wouldn't have done it because they just didn't think of it are now thinking about it, and it will convert like 10 or 20,000. So literally just say it and you're good—subscribe!"