Controversies and Workplace Culture

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK . Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype , like those five dollars roses at a gas station, or a second hand piece of technology that breaks in the first ten minutes . Marketers know that feeling. We optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach and reacts , but when they don't show revenue , well, that 's a not so great conversation with the CFO . LinkedIn has a word for that Bullspend . Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bulls spend. Advertise on LinkedIn , the network that works for you . Spend two hundred and fifty dollars on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a two hundred fifty credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn. com slash broadcast. That's LinkedIn. com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply . Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day . But what policy changes should investors be watching . Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at Schwab. com slash Washingtonwise. That's schwab dot com slash Washingtonwise It's twenty twenty three, a young man is lying down in a black suit. A fly lands on his cheek and he doesn't bother swatting it away. It's the first living thing he's seen in days. That's because our man is lying in a glass coffin buried under twenty thousand pounds of dirt. From a walkie talkie, a group of excited young men tell him he's just hit two hundred million subscribers . He turns to the camera and says Verizon five G home Internet is exactly what it sounds like. It's wireless internet for your home. And with that one line, he's made a million dollars. But that is pocket change for this first YouTuber billionaire . Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Every episode we take a billionaire and we find out how they made their money. We take them from zero to their first million and then from a million onto a billion. My name is Xing and I'm a journalist author and podcaster. And I'm Simon Jack. I'm the BC business editor. And on this episode, we have someone who, I have to admit initially passed me by when they became quite so famous. I think that's right. I mean, this was a cool category of things you can do to make money that once upon a time didn't exist. And the first time I became aware of it was when I became aware of how big YouTube was becoming and how many viewers it had? And I asked friends and family. I said, What are people watching on YouTube? And back came the answer. It's the YouTube channel Mr Beast. Well, Jimmy Donaldson's YouTube channel is the most popular YouTube channel on Earth. It's got almost half a billion subscribers. He's been described as the mozzart of the attention economy and he once said once you know how to make a video go viral, it's just about how to get as many out as possible. You can practically make unlimited money . He is currently worth two point five billion dollars according to Fortune Magazine, although there is some debate over this which we'll get into. His YouTube channel is known for extreme personal stunts like being buried alive for seven days, the game show style content with prizes of millions of dollars, homes, cars, even a private island. And he's also known for videos where he gives huge sums of cash to those in needs, but his charity for content model has made people wonder is this just a billionaire who's just reshaping capitalism? Yeah, some people could have called it charity poorly. He's just monetising charity to ultimately sell more adverts. Well, let's understand who Mr Beast AK Jimmy Donaldson really is . James Stevenson Donaldson, nicknamed Jimmy of course, was born in nineteen ninety eight in Wichita, Kansas, USA . His parents are both in the military. When he was young, so he was looked after by Aupere's nannies for much of the time. He's the middle child of three siblings , and as a child, the family moved three times around the southern United States. According to his mother, Sue, there were no cousins, no aunts, no uncles, it was really just us. Jimmy's parents split up in two thousand seven right when he was around eight. Sue actually wrote a book about the domestic abuse she says she experienced which his dad Charles hasn't publicly comment ed on, and Jimmy won't discuss his father in the media but he has no longer any contact with him. Sue retired from the military and the family moved to Greenville, South Carolina where she headed up the reserve officers training course at the University. Jimmy attended a local Christian private school. It was conservative punishment for bad behavior was writing out Bible verses . He has described himself as an introvert. He often talks about how difficult he finds casual convers ation, which is kind of weird for what he does. He didn't have many friends, he says, and rarely went out with other kids on the weekend, but he loved sport, especially baseball. And around age fifteen, though, he was diagnosed with Crohn's disease , autoimmune inflammatory bowel condition. That meant he had to drop out of playing sports so more time inside at home. And he spent a lot of time indoors on his computer on YouTube. So as his whole episode is about how to get rich and getting rich off YouTube. Let's do a quick kind of potted history of the platform. So YouTube was founded in two thousand five as a site for sharing videos uploaded by users and it adopted the slogan broadcast yourself . through And the late two thousands, a lot of more people were spending their time online. It grew really rapidly. And Google came in and bought it for one point six five billion dollars. And everyone at that time I remember thinking gosh, that seems a lot of money for something which is basically people just posting videos of themselves . But I can tell you right now that conservative estimate of what YouTube is worth is something like five hundred billion dollars, like half a trillion. It's one of the most successful platforms ever invented. And it's funny because I remember when YouTube first came out, the overall vibe that it had was sort of, do you remember that TV show America's Best Home Videos? Yes, where people would send in home videos of their auntie falling flat on her face after Thanksgiving, that kind of thing , like goofy stunts. Bloopers, yeah. And I do remember people saying at the time, how much is this going to be worth? This is literally just a single television show's worth of material on the internet. Yeah, but it's got a very interesting economic commercial model. Basically YouTube gives channels fifty five percent of their ad revenue. It keeps the other forty five percent and initially only a few high profile channels could monetize their videos , but within a few years there was a whole new wave of creators who post videos and turned posting videos into the job that we know is today. This is not the first time we've come across this sort of thing. And what's amazing is that all these creators, they're all posting their own content and they're all inadvertently working for Google in a sense because that money goes to YouTube which goes to Google. Well by twenty ten Justin Bieber was releasing his song Baby , YouTube was becoming recognised as a legitimate pipeline to creating pop stars. At the same time there was a new kind of star being created. A YouTuber called PewDipie launched his channel in twenty ten, commentating on people playing video games. And at the start of twenty thirteen, this creator had four million subscribers. By the end of the year, he had twenty million. He was the most subscribed to YouTube channel. And this is the world that Jimmy grew up in. He was a fan of Pewdiep ie. At age eleven, he uploaded his first videos of himself playing Minecraft and Call of Duty. At age thirteen, he started a new channel which he called Mr Beast . He tried video game commentary which seems nuts to me, but I know it was incredibly popular . And then he made videos estimating how much money YouTubers made. Quite interesting. He made hundreds of videos with minimal traction, but Jimmy has been described for those that know him as obsessive and with sport no longer an option because of his Crohn's disease, he turned his fixation into YouTube and how it works. After graduating from school in twenty sixteen, Jimmy enrolled in Pitt Community College, but he didn't actually go to classes. Instead, he thought that by studying YouTube , he could understand its algorithm and learn a secret to viral hits. And his worst intro series of videos poked fun at other YouTuber introductions and how they introduced themselves on video , it proved relatively popular and very matter. And he got his first check from YouTube when his channel Mr. Beast crossed ten thousand subscribers, but you know, this was barely more than pocket money at the time. Still, Jimmy continued experimenting. He slowly made incremental gains in subscribers. Yeah. And then he did something that quite a lot of our billionaires did. He told his mum he wanted to drop out of college and pursue YouTube full time. She told him that if he wasn't studying he had to move out so we did. At this point he had around two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. He wasn't making much from the adverts enough to scrape by though . So he moved into an apartment with friends who were similarly YouTube obsessed. And Jimmy said that for a few years he was just relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality. Important word here, studying the YouTube algorithm. Their research, Jimmy and his friends , was almost scientific, so they would take, for instance, thousands of thumbnails from YouTube, which is the kind of little image you see that acts as the cover for the video, to see if there was a correlation to the brightness of the image, to how many views it would get. So for videos that got over ten million views they would count how often they would cut the camera angles. That's so interesting because one of the things I noticed about watching some of the videos for this it's the number of cuts, the use of animation , how long you stay on a single frame. It's a blizzard of visual stimulus. In january twenty seventeen, he released a video called I Counted to one hundred thousand . That's exactly what it sounds like. He actually sits there for forty hours and at the end he looks deliriously at the camera and says what am I doing with my life? It's almost a bit like performance art in a way. Yeah, it is. And it got six and a half million views in a week. I mean, he said it calls it performance art. It's sort of there's a kind of morbid fascination or macabre fascination with watching someone doing something really boring. Yeah, I also think, you know, the numbers obviously helps, right? You know, if you released a video called I count it to a hundred , nobody will watch it, but the fact that it's a huge number that's almost kind of inconceivable sort of helps. I mean, I remember when I was in journalism school, we always got told if you're going to put a number on the cover, make sure it's a big one. Yeah, and it just sucks people in. I have to take this moment to say that I actually did something a little similar to this. I did I said Erm ten thousand times in a row. On camera. Oh no, I did it when I was younger because there was a program about World Records and someone had written into this thing called the Record Breakers and said that my teacher said Erm one hundred and fifty times in a row and asked the editor of the Guinness Book of World Records , whether this was World Records. He said, No, it sounds a lot. There's no official record. And I was only seven years old and I said Erm ten thousand times wrote into the record breakers and said, I'm delighted to inform you I have shattered that record. And they wrote back and said there's no official record, but this is certainly the most we've ever heard of. Now I think it's unlikely that anyone ever broke that record. Wow. So as far as I know, that record still stands. What a shame YouTube wasn't around to capture those magic moments. It is a shame YouTube wasn't around. You could be have been the Mr Beast of Counting . Well, sadly I'm not, but this act of endurance was a formula he'd repeat over and over. Other videos including reading every wh theere dict inion ary. Watching Jake Paul's rap video It's everyday bro for ten hours straight and alongside these endurance stunts he's also making the kind of things that would appeal to teenage boys. And actually the first time I heard of Mr Be.ast was through my teenage cousins . He microwaved an iPhone, he wrapped himself in Klingfilm, kind of funny silly goofy stunts. After that counting video, however, Jimmy hit a million subscribers and crucially for his business model, it also brought him his very first brand deal. It was a company called Quid, which is an app for trading digital collectible cards. It gave him ten thousand dollars for sponsorship . And what he did with that ten grand would eventually chang theed course of his life . Yeah. And in fact, in the opening of his next video, he counts piles of cash and tells the audience, this is not my money. This is a new weekly series where I get companies to sponsor my videos and I give a hundred percent of what they pay me away to random people . After he talks about Quidd for a couple of minutes we get to the heart of the video he walks up to a homeless man who is holding a cardboard sign in the middle of a busy road. Jimmy hands him an envelope stuffed with ten thousand dollars . And at first the man is in shock and disbelief. Then he hugs Jimmy. Jimmy talks to him, the man describes falling on hard times. It's heartbreaking, it's warming. The video is low quality, but Jimmy comes across as, you know, sweet and kind and you know, that becomes a bit of a pattern or a kind of you know, if you like an exemplar for some of the stuff he does in the future. Yeah, and the video did resonate with people. So Jimmy did set about making more of this kind of content. He gave a thousand dollars to multiple homeless people. There are videos titled Tipping Uber drivers ten grand and tipping waitresses with real gold bars. And I think it's worth reflecting on exactly what the videos look like as well because I think if you haven't actually watched Mr. Beast content, you might be listening to all this and thinking to yourself, I mean, he's basically just making television before YouTube. But actually when you watch a Mr. Beast video, like a recent one involved sort of fake crashing a plane in the wilderness and getting people to survive for as long as possible. That is essentially a television show that probably has been done before. Yeah. But the Mr Beast version of that is rather than spending time dwelling on any of the character s, you know, building up a rapport with the audience like getting into their backstory. You don't know any of these people's names. No. They are just kind of characters in a mister Beast video, almost like video game NPCs in a sense. That's interesting, like non player characters. Exactly. So the stories don't really matter. What matters is how many of them survive, the numbers involved, the big cash prize. It's not really about telling stories as much as it is about the stunt itself. Yeah, well, it worked because he's soon earning one hundred thousand dollars a month from his channel through advertising and sponsorship, but he's plowing those profits back into the content. By the end of twenty eighteen, he released a video boasting he'd given away a total of a million dollars . He was also starting to grow the business side of Mr Beast, which was becoming more than just Jimmy himself. So he was hiring school friends to help him plan and film the content. They began appearing with him on camera, this kind of crew of mates is a very big part of the Mr Beast kind of universe. And he was also professionalizing as a content creator. So he signed with a Dallas based talent management and digital marketing agency. So he's kind of smartening up in a way. It's interesting this kind of if you like zoo of people he gets around in the entourage that becomes quite a big part of it. And to me , it reminded me of an earlier generation of this kind of stuff. Do you remember the Jackass series where it was basically basically a bunch of young men doing dumb stuff? Yeah . Like I think some of the old jackass stunts were things like we rode a shopping trolley into each other kind of stuff. Yeah, it was sort of quite high peril stuff and a lot of people got injured in that. And obviously we'll talk about some of the safety issues later. But there was also this charitable element, which I don't remember from Jackass, because he posted a video giving his mum a hundred thousand dollars in cash at first she refused. He said, If I don't give it to you, I don't have a viral video. And that's all important, of course. And she laughed and said, You're using me for views to which he responded, Yes, but you get money too, so we're both happy. And it was the equivalent of Sue's entire year's salary, so she retired and joined can't be them, join him, joined her son's burgeoning company. Yeah, I mean, even from the start of Mr B's career, you know, when he's posting videos commenting on other YouTubers videos, there's a real element of meta to all the stuff that he does. Yes. You know, he knows that people are watching, he knows it's attention that makes the videos worth it. And so you know, it was working because, you know, he's an exponential growth. He's actually said the beauty of YouTube is double the effort is double the views. It's like ten times. The first million subscribers you get will take years, but the second will come in a few months. So by the end of twenty nineteen, YouTube announced that a Mr Beast video was the most popular of that year, which they measured in likes, and it was called Make This Video The Most Liked Video on YouTube. The whole meta thing. The video actually involves seven young men being egged in various ways and it got eleven million like. So to put this on to context, Game of Thrones one of the most successful television shows of all time. The finale got nineteen million. Succession season two finale got one million and they got eleven million for people throwing eggs at each other. Yeah, I mean the disproportionate rate of investment to actual output have to admire it. There were fewer dragons in the egging scene. Exactly. And Mr. Beast also made the top ten most viewed creators list, a staggering two point two billion total views, making him number seven overall and just shows what a massive shift we are seeing in the way content is consumed created , young people moving away from legacy media. And I think I'm right in saying in the latest broadcast figures YouTube actually became the most watched channel on TV. And that's not people just on their phones or on laptops. That is people watching YouTube on the TV set in the corner because obviously smart TV's have apps and you can do that. So YouTube is now just a colossus, which other content creators are having to work with and put their content on to get to their audiences. Yeah, you may very well be watching this content on YouTube actually . Which just goes to show how times have changed. Yeah. But by this point, Mr. Beast videos were very high production value. He said that they take months of prep. A lot of them take four to five days of relentless filming. There's a reason other people don't do what I do. And a single video was now costing him on average three hundred thousand dollars . The most expensive one was one point two million dollars, a million of which was given to the contestant if you could, as you can guess, keep his hand on a stack of cash for the longest amount of time . But Jimmy doesn't have to wait for a commissioner to green light his ideas and give him the money. You know, he doesn't have to hire big crews, basically, Jimmy and his friends filming mostly in Greenville. Yeah, not Hollywood or London. So now we get to the coronavirus pandemic, which legacy media found very challenging. It's hard to go on a shoot when everything's on lockdown . Traditional television was even more expensive. And with more people, especially kids during the pandemic sat at home in front of a screen, the viewership exploded the end. of By twenty twenty, he had fifty million subscribers and was named Creator of the Year at the Streamy Awards, which are the Oscars of YouTube. That year he also launched another channel, Mr Beast Philanthropy, and it became home for his more philanthropic videos like giving twenty thousand shoes to kids in Africa and I adopted a hundred dogs. That channel gives a hundred percent of its ad revenue, merch sales and sponsorship to charitable causes. Okay, but let's keep the total eyes on what Jimmy is actually earning at this point because time and again, he stresses that he plows all this money back into his channel saying money is a vehicle to do bigger videos, make better content . At the end of twenty twenty, Forbes included him on their list of highest paid YouTube stops for the first time at number two, straight at number two, having made twenty four million dollars that year. So even if he's spending a large chunk of that on his content, it's pretty safe to say that at this point Jimmy Dolphson, AKA Mr Beast, is a millionaire, aged twenty two. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype, like those five dollars roses at a gas station or a second hand piece of technology that breaks in the first ten minutes . Marketers know that feeling. We optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach and reacts , but when they don't show revenue , well, that's a not so great conversation with the CFO . LinkedIn has a word for that Bullspend . Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn adds generates the highest roads of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bulls bend. Advertise on Linked In , the network that works for you . Spend two hundred and fifty dollars on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a two hundred fifty credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn dot com slash broadcast . That's linked in dot com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. This is Daniel Fischell. And Ryder Strong from Pod Meets World. Cat parents unite. We have to look out for each other. Yes, we all know the feeling of being ignored by our little babies a little too well. Yeah, I often wonder to myself, does my cat even love me? Well, there's only one solution to solve that, Shiba. Feed your cat a Sh andib go from feeling ignored to truly adored in twelve days guaranteed or your money back. Sheba has a wide array of products, appetizers, entrees, treats, and even a kittens menu that will win over even the pickiest eater. 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Ts and C's apply . I can. You can't spell American without it. During the Jeep this Make the summer event, celebrate one hundred and fifty years of the country that can, with the vehicle that always can. I can go where freedom takes me with Jeep Wrangler's legendary four by four capability. I can bring the whole crew, with grand wagoners, three rows of seating. I can chase every day, with Cherokee's one hundred and forty standard and available safety features. And I can see this country in all its beauty in the award winning Grand Cherokee. You can do anything with a great deal at the Jeep Make this the summer event. Jeep is a registered trademark of FCA USLC . Well, let's take Mr Beast from a million onto a billion. Like so many of our billionaires, Jimmy's first move was to diversify into the consumer market. So in twenty twenty, he launched a company called Mr Beast Berger as a ghost kitchen concept . You know, it allows fans to order branded muse through an app fulfilled by about six partner restaurants around the United States. So it's kind of like a modern day franchise system. He drives demand through his audience by talking about it. Other restaurants handle the production and shares and the profits . And a video of the launch event got two hundred million views on his YouTube channel. You know, he's basically got his own billboard advertising system working for him here. And they sold over a million sandwiches in the very first couple of months. And within a year and a half he'd made a hundred million in revenue. So that's a good amount of money. But it wasn't all plain sailing . Customers started complaining the food was disgusting, revolting, they were posting images of raw meat. And Jimmy told a fan on Twitter, you know, the problem with beast burger is I can't guarantee the quality of the order . When working with other restaurants, it's impossible to control it. Sadly you see that coming. Jimmy sued the company virtual dining concept who he partner with to do all this. The lawsuit claimed the company has irreparably harmed his reputation . And it's interesting for creators , they are the product, right? So their reputation is everything. So getting associated with disgusting burgers is a problem . The other company, Virtual Dining Concepts countersued for one hundred million dollars claiming Jim was trying to bully the company into a better deal, and actually this legal battle is still ongoing despite a judge urging them to settle it. Well, when the burgers were flaming out, Jimmy pivoted to launch something different, a chocolate bar brand called Fistables. Have you ever tried this? I haven't, but I have seen it pop up relentlessly in his videos. They waste no opportunity to promote it. Well, the brand has quickly become dominant, so it counts for roughly seventy percent of his revenue. In its second year, it secured deals like a jersey patch with the Charlotte Hornets, a sports team. It's also actually in, comparison to Beesbergers, gain an unusually strong fan base. Supporters have organized supermarket displays, like they've gone into supermarkets and just like put a little display of the chocolate bars themselves. You have an army of promoters for your brand as well with this kind of business model there. Yeah, you've got a beast army. Well, and then Jimmy expanded into lunchly, which is a joint venture with other YouTubers, KSI and Logan Paul, which combines Feastables with their prime drink s. I mean, as you can imagine, this product drew quite a lot of complaints. Remember Prime drinks? Because there was a period when I was going into my local shop and they were they were selling out of this drink called Prime and it was it was very expensive. It was so expensive. I couldn't believe that people I was like, why how on earth did this happen? Because I hadn't seen any advertising for it . I'm absolutely certain that I'm, you know, explaining the reason now for something that I could not fathom at the time. Yeah, it's all on YouTube being advertised to essentially kids. It's a chocolate bar and an energy drink, not exactly the kind of thing that children should be consuming en masse. So you know, overall there were wins and losers for Jimmy 's business portfolio. But back on YouTube, he was reigning supreme. By the end of twenty twenty one, he spent three and a half million dollars recreating the popular Netflix series Squid Game . And that was a massive TV phenomenon. And let's just explain for those who haven't seen that smash hit what it was about. It was huge. So it's a Korean drama about a fictional game where people who are hard up in their luck compete for a huge cash prize and they compete in these sort of games based on childhood games, you know, things like tug of wall Tug of Wall for instance. Yeah. Grandma's footsteps when you have to walk when someone's not looking and then when it turns around if you're still moving , but if you if you mess up on this game there are deadly consequences. Yeah, exactly. So if you lose the game you die and the idea is to be the last person standing. So a massive hit and originally intended to be a critique of capitalism. Yeah, well interesting, isn't it? So let's get on to that because I think we can have that very debate right here because Jimmy took on four hundred fifty six people to be the competitors to compete for four hundred fifty six thousand dollars across the same type of games that were on squid games. Although in this version, mercifully people didn't die if they lost, but the video went mega viral. It currently has nine hundred million views. That's almost a billion insane numbers . And that video arguably was the thing that brought him to the attention or into the mainstream. Views across his channel double from the previous year and he was now very much a celebrity , but more exposure meant more criticism. Yeah, exactly. Because like I said earlier, Squid Game the Television show was about a critique of capitalism of the kind of society that drives people to take part in such an extreme game at the expense of their lives. And a lot of people felt that Jimmy had completely missed the entire point of the original series. Mr. Beast's version turned into an entertainment, a spectacle. It basically replicated the very thing that the show itself was describing because it was basically a system which had left some people with nothing left to lose and therefore would risk it all on remarkably small odds of gaining some pot of money at the end. And there was there was a kind of, as you say, late stage capitalism desperation about it, which meant to be a critique , but the derivative of it was insanely popular. It wasn't people saying, Oh, I see what they're doing there. That's not for me. What a terrible route we're going down as a society. It's like, yes, I want especially in the one where I don't have to die. Yeah, exactly. It reminds me a little bit of how the original book and movie American Psycho was meant to be a searing critique of toxic masculinity and was instead adopted by the very manusphere that it probably would have critiqued itself. Yeah, gosh, good parallel. Still, you can argue no one died in Mr. Bee Squid Games. It's consensual entertainment and a lot of laughs. Well, Jimmy himself dismissed some of these criticisms saying the guy who made Squid Games the show literally said I like these people recreating the show. What the Squid Game creator said was a little more nuanced. He said I think all of it is very much in line with the capitalist society that is depicted in Squid Game. I actually think it enforces it and makes the message even greater. So there go amplifying the original point. Well, squad game cost Mr Beast millions to make, but it's also worth noting that he subsidizes all this more expensive content with cost efficient gaming and reaction channels which just feature him and his mates . It's also worth noting he achieved such a big global audience, all those millions of views because his channels are dubbed in multiple languages. I can detest that because I was trying to watch some of this and I couldn't get it off the Korean translation . So it is when I went to change it, it was in literally dozens of languages . Russian, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Japanese, you know, he's got a kind of global reach. And at this point, you know, there's more money than ever being made by content creators on YouTube as more viewers and advertisers choose this platform over traditional media. So in twenty twenty two, YouTube took a nearly thirty billion in ad revenue. That year, Jimmy earned fifty four million dollars, including thirty two million from ads across the channel, nine million from sponsored content and for the first time Jimmy was the top earning YouTuber. Earnings like that put him even ahead of huge social media influences like Kim Kardashian. We've done an episode on her . More traditional names like Angelina Jolie, Billy Eilish, and Jimmy said a lot of people still see YouTubers as a subclass of influencers. They still just don't truly understand the influence a lot of creators have. Yeah, because Jimmy is not a glitzy, glamorous Kim Kardashian guy. No, you know, he just looks like a regular guy. If you didn't watch Mr Beast content, you probably would walk past him on the street. Yeah, you could see him at a bus stop and you wouldn't stop and look twice. And you know, I have to say maybe this is a little bit harsh, but he's not the most charismatic guy on YouTube. There's a lot of people who comment quite regularly on how he doesn't appear to smile with his eyes. Yeah . It's also but I think going back to his childhood , there is something about the sort of the lonely introvert who's bored off his trolley and trying to find something to literally soak up the time. I think that's quite an appealing thing for some people. And he didn't play the multi multimillionaire because he said he's got you know made fifty four million in one year but he said I don't have access to any of my bank accounts. I have a chief financial officer and everything . But my mum is the one who has access to the master bank account. His mum's title is actually chief compliance officer, but many employees say she's effectively in charge of human resources, although a spokesperson says she's not. By twenty twenty four he had three hundred employees on his production team plus two hundred or more at Feastables. So it's no it's certainly not on one man b and. By this point, he had established a holding company Beast Industries. He remained founder, but he brought in professional executives to help him run a company which was expanding, building huge new content facilities in Greenvill e. And this is interesting. Jimmy wants his hometown to become a content creator hub. The company's then president said the biggest parallel I could draw is to Tyler Perry in Atlanta. We've done him on Good Bad Billionaire , the movie producer Mogul, Jimmy's creating his own studio system here and new producers come to Greenwail to give him housing, good salaries, three months to prove themselves. The way that people used to flock to the paramount in Lot Hollywood. They're flocking to Greenville. Yeah. And a producer who worked for Mr. Beast has said, You get all these people in a town where there's not much else going on, but the job. If you can show them you're a real believer in the beast way of doing things, you are rewarded. But in a cover interview with Jimmy, Time Magazine reported that of the dozen former employees Time interviewed, most had no problem with Donaldson but described a company culture that was toxic with a lot of bullying, a spokesperson for Mr. Beast said the company has high standards for performance and not everyone is best suited for this work. Many of those employees signed NDAs and wouldn't go on to record with Time Magazine , but some former employees have said that Mr Beast saw itself as separate from the rest of the entertainment industry and sometimes didn't prioritize safety and work culture. They reported concerns over limited training, a resistance to hiring experts for stunts, which have included explosives, fast cars, heavy machinery. A spokesperson has said safety is incredibly important and taken very seriously, and medics and experienced professionals tailored to the needs of production are on every set, adding the company is OSHA compliant that is a set of safety rules. Yeah, boilerplate statement over there . And so let us go then on to Jimmy's biggest and perhaps most controversial piece of entertainment to date at the, end of twenty twenty four , Beast Games was released, created, host and exec produced by Jimmy. The premise is two thousand people competing for five million dollars in prize money, essentially just a bigger version of Squid G ame. But instead of doing what he'd done his whole career , which is released this independently on YouTube channel, this was commissioned by and released on Amazon Prime. This is a big change. Yeah, I mean, you know, previously he kind of prided himself on being separate to the entertainment industry. And you know, while Amazon Prime is relatively new as a streaming service, compared to Mr. Beast it operates a lot more like a legacy media channel, the appeal for Amazon is obviously really clear. Jimmy is incredibly young. He's got a really loyal audience , but Jimmy was also getting a kind of new audience who are older, more traditional. And he said, You can tell a phenomenal story in a thirty minute YouTube video, but with an extended series you can get more people invested in the brand. And also there was another reason that it appealed to Jimmy because Amazon paid really well. Yep, it is a multi trillion dollar company and Amazon paid around one hundred million dollars for the first season of Beast Games staggering amount of money for a single season of unscripted content, right? From a YouTuber who's never made mainstream TV, but for Amazon two, point a eight trillion dollar company, one hundred million dollars is actually pretty cheap. Yeah, drop in the ocean. Beast Games was filmed in a gigantic football stadium in Las Vegas, where the two thousand contestants lived for days sleeping on the grass, they had to surrender their phones and medication while computing in physically demanding challenges, sometimes staying awake for up to three nights. More than a dozen participants told the New York Times that they experienced inadequate food or medical care. They cited long gaps between meals, delayed access to medication, even clean underwear. Oh dear. Some competitors also suffered injuries from the challenges which were very physical and there were some hospitalizations. One contestant said we were treated horribly. They took on this challenge of two thousand competitors. They should have known they needed an enormous crew to handle this correctly. Spokesperson for Mr. Beast said contestants have been offered three meals a day. The shoot was complicated by the crowd strike incident that crashed millions of window systems, plus extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and communications issues. They added that Mr Beast had started a form al review and taken steps to ensure that we learn from this experience while Amazon MGM studios declined to comment. Beast games opened the floodgates to more discussion, more reporting online about whether Mr Beast was a force for good in the world or something way more sinister. Yeah, people are starting to question his philanthropic motivations. One of the videos he released on his philanthropy channel caused criticism across newspaper columns and social media called A Thousand Blind People See for the First Time and Jimmy arranged for a thousand people to have cataract surgery on their eyes . I've seen this and there's a whole series of people peeling off the bandages and they can see for the first time . It's quite clear to me watching bits of that quite a lot of these people were , I would say, socioeconomically challenged. Yeah, did you get that sense that there was a real sense of , I mean, inadvertently , and I don't think he intended to do this when making the video, it is an indictment of the American healthcare system that all these people who had really good reasons for wanting to see, wanting to see their kids, you know , just couldn't get the access to healthcare or have the money to fix themselves. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tricky one, isn't it? Because I imagine that almost every single one of those thousand would be very grateful for the procedure. When quest ioned about this, Jimmy said, I know myself, I don't have anything to prove to anyone. I think what I've done speaks for itself. Yeah, I mean, on one hand, so the advertising revenue from Mr. Beast philanthropy means they can deliver millions of news to people . Millions of trees are planted, millions of pounds of trash removed from the ocean. These are all things they say they've done . You can also see from the way that Jimmy and his friends who help out hosting the video, they seem genuinely touched to be in contact with these people who are seeing for the first time. But something about the Mr Beast formula of fast cuts and high emotion and numbers and spectacle when applied to something like some people's disability . You know, for a lot of people, this philanthropy just feels exploitative. Exploitative is interesting. I just I wonder whether this generation of YouTube viewers thinks differently about what exploitation means . They think differently about what privacy means, what of your personal details you're prepared to share. They feel differently about what selling out, if you like, means. All of those concepts slightly different. , I think Yeah, I mean, you know, you talked about how Mr Beast's content is sort of similar to Jackass. Yeah. But I really struggled to think that Jackass people like Johnny Knoxville would feel comfortable at any point doing a stunt turning, to camera and say, This video was funded by Verizon five G Internet. They would never do that. They would think that was deeply uncool. Yeah , but you know, Mr. Beast exemplifies a generation where that isn't such a big deal. We've been talking about these concerns, but it's worth flagging that a lot of the fanbase just doesn't seem to care about this kind of stuff. You know, season one of Beast Games became one of Amazon Prime Video's most viewed shows, Amazon's renewed it for two seasons. Meanwhile, Jimmy's own channel has continued to grow. By twenty twenty five, he became the first YouTuber to hit four hundred million subscribers and Beast Industries that year was valued at five billion dollars. Amazing. So Jimmy owns about half of that company, making him a billionaire worth about two point five billion dollars at the age of twenty seven years old. It's astonishing. It's just incredible and it's rapid . It sounds exhausting because every moment you've got to outdo yourself. That's one of the things, isn't it that everything's got, he pours it back in to bigger and bolder and more grabby and sort of more controversial and more eyeballs and then have to do it all over again. It's kind of, you know, having to sort of keep the beast, if you like, having to feed the beast in itself is a full time job. Yeah, I mean there's a kind of horror film in there, isn't there? Yeah, where a kind of Mr. Beast stands and slowly goes insane try,ing to keep up . At Age twenty seven, Jimmy Donaldson is a billionaire. Let's now take him beyond a billion. Well, interestingly, there's actually some debate as to whether Jimmy is actually a billionaire or not. Okay. I know so his story are weathering with this then ., I W meanow this is interest,ing because some people say he is and some people say he isn't. So this kind of billionaire status has kind of gradually emerged into the picture. So Fortune have outright named him a billionaire because of this, because of his company as they became valuing beast industries. Forbes, however, which we use quite a lot on the show, haven't formally updated his net worth to over a billion. Okay , it's worth noting so many of our billionaires are declared so on paper. They don't have money in the bank. It's because of the value of the stake they have in a company. Time and again we've seen billionaires declare how cash poor they are. Even people like Elon Musk or Jim Shark's Ben Francis because they're saying I can't go and spend this money. It's in the shares in my company. Jimmy's particularly insistent on this. He says, technically everyone watching this video has more money than me in their bank account. If you take away the equity value of my company as in what's worth my company's worth, that doesn't buy me McDonald 's in the morning. You know, Jimmy Stow has grand ambitions though because Mr. Beast and this is truly kind of remarkable is becoming a banker. So Beast Industries has expanded into financial services by acquiring Step, which is a banking style platform aimed at teens and young adults. There's no age requirements sign up for it, with millions of millions of users. So this move kind of places Jimmy in a much more tightly regulated space. He has ambitions to expand into lending, potentially cryptocurrency . Obviously, marketing crypto to children is not without any controversy. Even Senator Elizabeth Warren has formally questioned Jimmy in a letter a. sp Andokespers on for Beast Industries has said the company's main motivation was to improve the financial future of the next generation , adding the company's reviewing all existing offerings and marketing to make sure they meet very high quality standards and comp ly with applicable laws. It's interesting that because you've seen quite a few companies try and break into the financial services area with particularly sort of younger branded things like Monzo, like Revolut ion taking on the old banking establishment. What some of them have found is that having a banking license and going into financial services is incredibly tightly regulated and it's not as much not as free wheeling as some other industries. So we will watch that one with interest. Also, once you get finance involved, scandal is never usually far away . But other things can happen quickly. Well, it's financial journalists like you start sniffing around exactly . So it's time to score Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast on our billionaire categories. And this is a bit of fun where we score people from zero to ten on categories including wealth, controversy, power and legacy. So let's start with wealth. Well, probably worth two and a half billion, not a clear consensus by any means. But you know, having said that he's still only twenty seven . So he's got a long way to go. Yeah, he's explicitly said profit is not the goal . Eansxionp is money as a tool for him to accomplish his goal of dominating YouTube. Yeah, I wonder if actually when we're scoring him on wealth, we should take into account the fact that so much of his content is about wealth. It kind of makes sense in that way why he's gone into banking because all of his content is so driven by numbers and money . It's almost like a children's book, do you know what I mean? It's like so and so went to the dollar store, then we went to the ten dollar store. Yeah, it's almost like you're teaching children to count. Yes, okay. So Wealthy's actually plays a part in the draw, doesn't it on some of this stuff, you know, going to compete for five million dollars? And he's made a lot very young , so I'm going to give him a five I mean, I think I would probably I'll give him slightly more. I'll give him a six out of ten. Okay. Because I feel like he exemplifies a very different kind of approach to wealth. Yeah. Maybe one that we haven't really seen on the show before. That's true. His entire life is about acquiring big numbers and big things , but not in the sense that he's buying a maserati. Yeah. He's just pedaling that message to people. But almost in a sort of frivolous way . It's important and frivolous at the same time. It's kind of it's a weird combination. Okay, five for me, six for you. Controversy ? I mean, there's been quite a few, you know, concerns about safety and labour practices at the company, all those complaints that were raised after the filming of Beast Games . And like anyone who lives by the online sword, sometimes you can die by it. People have dug up stuff, comments he's made in the past, some racist , some homophobic language he's used in the past. Yeah, he's since apologised for them. A spokesperson has said he was a teenager . Like many kids he used inappropriate language while trying to be funny. But he's not a sort of rage bater is he in that sense sense or a kind of someone who's trying to mobilize sort of racist or homophobic feelings in order to generate rage content and views. No. Okay. And of course the, criticisms of the philanthropy stuff as being charity porn. Some people have called it poverty as spectacle. You could call it , you know, which he's defiant about. So I think he's a pretty controversial character. I don't think