MrBeast: The business of going viral

11:38Simon Jack:It is a shame YouTube wasn't around. You could have been the Mr. Beast of counting.

11:42Zing Tsjeng:Well, sadly, I'm not. But this act of endurance was a formula he'd repeat over and over. Other videos, including reading every word in the dictionary.

11:51Simon Jack:Watching Jake Paul's rap video, It's Everyday Bro, for 10 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 Beast was through my teenage cousins. He microwaved an iPhone. He wrapped himself in cling film. 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$10 ,000 for sponsorship.

12:25Simon Jack:And what he did with that 10 grand would eventually change the course of his life.

12:29Zing Tsjeng: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 100 % of what they pay me away to random people. After he talks about quid for a couple of minutes, we get to the heart of the video. He walks up to a homeless man who's holding a cardboard sign in the middle of a busy road. Jimmy hands him an envelope stuffed with$10 ,000. And at first the man is in shock, in disbelief. Then he hugs Jimmy. Jimmy talks to him. The man describes falling on hard times.

13:02Zing Tsjeng: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, like an exemplar for some of the stuff he does in the future.

13:17Simon Jack:Yeah, and the video did resonate with people. So Jimmy did set about making more of this kind of content. He gave$1 ,000 to multiple homeless people. There are videos titled tipping Uber drivers, 10 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's content, You might be listening to all this and thinking to yourself, I mean, he's basically just making television, but for 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.

13:51Simon Jack:That is essentially a television show that probably has been done before. But the Mr. Beast version of that is rather than spending time dwelling on any of the characters, you know, building up a rapport with the audience, like getting into their backstory. You don't know any of these people's names. They are just kind of characters in a Mr. Beast video, almost like video game NPCs in a sense.

14:11Zing Tsjeng:Oh, that's interesting. Like non-player characters.

14:13Simon Jack: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.

14:24Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, well, it worked because he's soon earning$100 ,000 a month from his channel through advertising and sponsorship. But he was plowing those profits back into the content. By the end of 2018, he released a video boasting he'd given away a total of a million dollars.

14:38Simon Jack: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 professionalising 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.

15:05Zing Tsjeng:It's interesting, this kind of, if you like, zoo of people he gets around him, 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 a bunch of young men doing dumb stuff?

15:20Simon Jack:Yeah. I think some of the old Jackass stunts were things like we rode a shopping trolley into each other. that kind of stuff.

15:28Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, it was sort of quite high peril stuff and a lot of people got injured in there 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 $100 ,000 in cash at first she refused but 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 beat him, join him, joined her son's burgeoning company.

16:00Simon Jack:Yeah. I mean, even from the start of Mr. Beast'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. 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 in exponential growth. He's actually said the beauty of YouTube is double the effort, is double the views. It's like 10 times. The first million subscribers you get will take years, but the second will come in a few months. So by the end of 2019, YouTube announced that a Mr.

16:31Simon Jack: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 11 million likes. So to put this all into context, Game of Thrones, one of the most successful television shows of all time. The finale got 19 million. Succession season two finale got 1 million.

16:57Zing Tsjeng:And they got 11 million for people throwing eggs at each other.

17:00Simon Jack:Yeah, I mean, the disproportionate rate of investment to actual output, you have to admire it.

17:06Zing Tsjeng:There were fewer dragons in the egging scenes. And Mr Beast also made the top 10 most viewed creators list, a staggering 2.2 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 TVs have apps and you can do that.

17:44Zing Tsjeng: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.

17:53Simon Jack:Yeah, you may very well be watching this content on YouTube, actually, which just goes to show how times have changed.

17:59Zing Tsjeng:Yeah.

17:59Simon Jack: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$300 ,000. The most expensive one was$1.2 million, a million of which was given to the contestant. He 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 greenlight his ideas and give him the money. You know, he doesn't have to hire big crew.

18:32Simon Jack:It's basically Jimmy and his friends filming mostly in Greenville, 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.

18:48Zing Tsjeng:And with more people, especially kids during the pandemic, sat at home in front of a screen, the viewership exploded. By the end of 2020, he had 50 million subscribers and was named creator of the year at the Streamy Awards, which are the Oscars of YouTube.

19:02Simon Jack:That year he also launched another channel, Mr Beast Philanthropy, and it became home for his more philanthropic videos like giving 20 ,000 shoes to kids in Africa and I adopted 100 dogs. That channel gives 100 % of its ad revenue, merch sales and sponsorship to charitable causes.

19:19Zing Tsjeng:OK, but let's keep the totaliser on what Jimmy is actually earning at this point, because time and again, he stresses that he ploughs all this money back into his channel, saying money is a vehicle to do bigger videos, make better content. At the end of 2020, Forbes included him on their list of highest paid YouTube stubs for the first time at number two, straight at number two, having made$24 million 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 Donaldson, aka Mr Beast is a millionaire, age 22

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23:06Simon Jack: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 2020, he launched a company called Mr. Beast Burger as a ghost kitchen concept. You know, it allows fans to order branded meals through an app fulfilled by about 1600 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 in the profits. And a video of the launch event got 200 million views on his YouTube channel.

23:42Simon Jack: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 100 million in revenue. So, you know, that's a good amount of money.

23:54Zing Tsjeng: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, 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've been seeing that coming. Jimmy sued the company, Virtual Dining Concepts, who he partnered 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.

24:28Zing Tsjeng:So getting associated with disgusting burgers is a problem. The other company, Virtual Dining Concepts, counter-sued for$100 million, claiming Jimmy 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 in.

24:43Simon Jack:Well, when the burgers were flaming out, Jimmy pivoted to launch something different, a chocolate bar brand called Feastables. Have you ever tried this?

24:50Zing Tsjeng:I haven't, but I have seen it pop up relentlessly in his videos. They waste no opportunity to promote it.

24:57Simon Jack:Well, the brand has quickly become dominant, So it counts for roughly 70 % 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 Beast Burger's, gained an unusually strong fan base. Supporters have organised supermarket displays. Like they've gone into supermarkets and just like put a little display of the chocolate bars themselves.

25:20Zing Tsjeng:So you have an army of promoters for your brand as well with this kind of business model, don't you?

25:25Simon Jack: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 drinks. I mean, as you can imagine, this product drew quite a lot of complaints.

25:39Zing Tsjeng:I remember Prime drinks because there was a period when I was going into my local shop and they were selling out of this drink called Prime. And 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 I could not fathom at the time.

26:02Simon Jack: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 children should be consuming en masse. So, you know, overall, there were wins and losers for Jimmy's business portfolio.

26:15Zing Tsjeng:But back on YouTube, he was reigning supreme. By the end of 2021, he spent three and a half million dollars recreating the popular Netflix series Squid Game. and that was a massive TV phenomenon. Let's just explain for those who haven't seen that smash hit, what it was about.

26:30Simon Jack: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 War. Tug of War, for instance.

26:48Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, well, 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 mess up on this game, there are deadly consequences.

26:58Simon Jack: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.

27:07Zing Tsjeng: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 456 people to be the competitors to compete for$456 ,000 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 900 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.

27:43Zing Tsjeng:But more exposure meant more criticism.

27:45Simon Jack:Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, 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 it into an entertainment, into spectacle. It basically replicated the very thing that the show itself was describing.

28:12Zing Tsjeng: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 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 in, especially in one where I don't have to die.

28:46Simon Jack: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 manosphere that it probably would have critiqued itself.

28:59Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, gosh, good parallel.

29:01Simon Jack:Still, you can argue no one died in Mr. Beast's Squid Game.

29:04Zing Tsjeng:It's consensual entertainment and it's 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 you go, amplifying the original point.

29:29Simon Jack:Well, Squid Game costs Mr Beast millions to make, but it's also worth noting that he subsidises 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 achieves such a big global audience, all those millions of views, because his channels are dubbed in multiple languages.

29:48Zing Tsjeng:I can attest to that because I was trying to watch some of this and I couldn't get it off the Korean translation. So when I went to change it, it was in literally dozens of languages.

29:57Simon Jack:Russian, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Japanese. He's got a kind of global reach. And at this point, 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 2022, YouTube took in nearly 30 billion in ad revenue. Wow.

30:18Zing Tsjeng:That year, Jimmy earned$54 million, including 32 million from ads across the channel, 9 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 influence like Kim Kardashian. We've done an episode on her. More traditional names like Angelina Jolie, Billie 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.

30:50Simon Jack: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.

31:00Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, you could see him at a bus stop and you wouldn't stop and look twice.

31:03Simon Jack: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.

31:13Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. It's also, but I think going back to his childhood, there is something about the sort of, you know, the lonely introvert who's bored off his trolley and trying to find something, 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-multi-millionaire because he said he's got, you know, made 54 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.

31:48Zing Tsjeng:But many employees say she's effectively in charge of human resources, although a spokesperson says she's not. By 2024, he had 300 employees on his production team, plus 200 or more at Feastables. So it's certainly not a one-man band.

32:02Simon Jack:By this point, he'd established a holding company, Beast Industries. He remained founder, but he brought in professional executives to help him run the company, which was expanding, building huge new content facilities in Greenville. 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 in Mogul. Jimmy's creating his own studio system here and new producers come to Greenville to give in housing, good salaries, three months to prove themselves.

32:37Zing Tsjeng:It's the way that people used to flock to the Paramount lot in Hollywood. They're flocking to Greenville.

32:43Simon Jack: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.

32:53Zing Tsjeng: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.

33:11Simon Jack:Many of those employees signed NDAs and wouldn't go on the 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 prioritise 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 on every set, adding the company is OSHA compliant.

33:46Simon Jack:That is a set of safety rules.

33:48Zing Tsjeng: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 2024, Beast Games was released, created, host and exec produced by Jimmy. The premise is 2 ,000 people competing for$5 million in prize money, essentially just a bigger version of Squid Game. But instead of doing what he'd done his whole career, which is release this independently on YouTube channel, this was commissioned by and released on Amazon Prime. This is a big change.

34:20Simon Jack: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 30-minute YouTube video, but with an extended series, you can get more people invested in the brand.

34:54Simon Jack:And also there was another reason that it appealed to Jimmy, because Amazon paid really well.

34:59Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, it is a multi-trillion dollar company, and Amazon paid around$100 million 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, a$2.8 trillion company,$100 million is actually pretty cheap.

35:18Simon Jack:Yeah, drop in the ocean. Beast Games was filmed in a gigantic football stadium in Las Vegas where the 2 ,000 contestants lived for days sleeping on the grass. They had to surrender their phones and medication while competing 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.

35:49Zing Tsjeng:Oh dear. Some competitors also suffered injuries from the challenges which were very physical and there were some hospitalisations. One contestant said, we were treated horribly. They took on this challenge of 2 ,000 competitors. They should have known they needed an enormous crew to handle this correctly. A spokesperson for Mr B 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 formal review and taken steps to ensure that we learn from this experience, while Amazon MGM Studios declined to comment.

36:26Simon Jack: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.

36:36Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, people were 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 that quite a lot of these people were, I would say, socioeconomically challenged. Do you get that sense? Yes.

37:08Simon Jack:Yeah. There's 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 health care 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 health care or have the money to fix themselves.

37:29Zing Tsjeng: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 questioned 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.

37:43Simon Jack:Yeah, I mean, on one hand, so the advertising revenue from Mr. Beast's philanthropy means they can deliver millions of meals 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.

38:15Zing Tsjeng:Yeah.

38:15Simon Jack:You know, for a lot of people, this philanthropy just feels exploitative.

38:19Zing Tsjeng: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 are slightly different, I think.

38:41Simon Jack:Yeah. I mean, you know, you talked about how Mr. Beast's content is sort of similar to Jackass. But I really struggle to think that Jackass people like, you know, Johnny Knoxville would feel comfortable at any point doing a stunt, turning to camera and say, this video was funded by Verizon 5G Internet. They would never do that. They would think that was deeply uncool. 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 fan base 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.

39:17Simon Jack:Amazon's renewed it for two seasons. Meanwhile, Jimmy's own channel has continued to grow. By 2025, he became the first YouTuber to hit 400 million subscribers and Beast Industries that year was valued at$5 billion. So Jimmy owns about half of that company, making him a billionaire worth about$2.5 billion at the age of 27 years old.

39:39Zing Tsjeng: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 do 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.

40:04Simon Jack:Yeah, I mean, there's a kind of horror film in that, isn't there?

40:07Zing Tsjeng:Yeah.

40:07Simon Jack:Where kind of Mr. Beast stands and slowly goes insane trying to keep up.

40:23Zing Tsjeng:Age 27, Jimmy Donaldson is a billionaire. Let's now take him beyond a billion.

40:29Simon Jack:Well, interestingly, there's actually some debate as to whether Jimmy is actually a billionaire or not.

40:33Zing Tsjeng:What? OK.

40:33Simon Jack:I know. So his status...

40:34Zing Tsjeng:Why are we bothering with this then?

40:36Simon Jack:Well, I mean, this is interesting 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 began valuing Beast Industries. Forbes, however, which we use quite a lot on this show, haven't formally updated his net worth to over a billion.

40:57Zing Tsjeng:OK, 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 Gymshark's Ben Francis, because they say, 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 my company's worth, that doesn't buy me McDonald's in the morning.

41:29Simon Jack:You know, Jimmy still 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 requirement to sign up for it, with millions and 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 and a spokesperson for Beast Industries has said the company's main motivation was to improve the financial future of the next generation, adding the company is reviewing all existing offerings and marketing to make sure they meet very high quality standards and comply with applicable laws.

42:21Zing Tsjeng: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 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 freewheeling as some other industries. So we will watch that one with interest. Also, once you get finance involved, scandal is never usually far away. Bad things can happen quickly.

42:53Simon Jack:Well, it's financial journalists like you start sniffing around.

42:56Zing Tsjeng: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.

43:11Simon Jack: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 27. So he's got a long way to go.

43:20Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, he's explicitly said profit is not the goal. Expansion is. Money is a tool for him to accomplish his goal of dominating YouTube.

43:29Simon Jack: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$10 store. It's almost like you're teaching children to count.

43:52Zing Tsjeng:Yes. Okay. So wealthies actually plays a part in the draw, doesn't it, on some of this stuff? You know, compete for$5 million. And he's made a lot very young. So I'm going to give him a five.

44:06Simon Jack:I mean, I think I'll probably, I'll give him slightly more. I'll give him a six out of 10.

44:10Zing Tsjeng:Okay.

44:10Simon Jack:Because I feel like he exemplifies a very different kind of approach to wealth.

44:14Zing Tsjeng:Yeah.

44:14Simon Jack: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. He's just peddling that message to people.

44:27Zing Tsjeng:But almost in a sort of frivolous way. It's important and frivolous at the same time. It's a weird combination. Okay, five for me, six for you. Controversy?

44:38Simon Jack: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.

44:48Zing Tsjeng: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 languages he's used in the past.

44:59Simon Jack: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.

45:07Zing Tsjeng:But he's not a sort of rage baiter, is he, in that sense? sense or a kind of someone who's trying to mobilise 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 think that to someone of my age, he's a kind of fascinating and controversial character in a way that he probably isn't to his own audience.

45:42Simon Jack:Yeah, that is true. I mean, if you've grown up watching Mr. Beast, you probably are able to brush off these criticisms quite easily because you're well and truly buried in the universe there. You know, all of this stuff makes sense to you.

45:55Zing Tsjeng:So because I'm older than you, I have to give a higher score for controversy than you. Maybe that's right. I'm going to give him a seven.

46:00Simon Jack:I'll give him a six out of ten.

46:03Zing Tsjeng:Okay, fine. The order is restored.

46:05Simon Jack:We got that one right. Next, we come on to power, which is an interesting one because you could look at the numbers that Mr. Beast pulls in and say, this guy is bigger than any platform, any media channel on the face of the planet.

46:18Zing Tsjeng:I think if you went into the offices of senior media executives around the world, they would be terrified of Mr. Beast. He, in a way, embodies something a bit bigger, which is the incursion that things like YouTube have made in traditional media landscape. and therefore in terms of power they would say that what he represents is changing their entire industry and is massively powerful. I'm going to give him high numbers for power. I'm going to give him an 8 for power. Wow.

46:47Simon Jack:I think I'm going to give him an 8 as well.

46:49Zing Tsjeng:Okay. And then on legacy, this is an interesting one because one wonders whether some of these famous things, stunts that he's done for Mr Beast will just be like, I don't know, are they going to stand the test of time?

47:02Simon Jack:Who knows? I mean, he's certainly going to go down to the history books for having been the person to understand YouTube and juice the algorithm in a way that not very many content creators have done successfully or ever since. So I think his legacy is probably going to be pretty high. But in terms of an artistic legacy, I mean, is anybody going back and rewatching any of the videos time and time again like they do with any kind of treasured childhood films? I don't really think so.

47:32Zing Tsjeng:I'm trying to think who the Mr. Beast of the last generation was. And, you know, I'm struggling to find that there is such a person, really.

47:40Simon Jack:No, I don't think it existed because something like YouTube didn't exist.

47:43Zing Tsjeng:No, fair enough. OK, legacy. I think the jury's out. I'm going to go straight down the middle and say five.

47:49Simon Jack:I'm going to score him slightly higher, I think, because he was, I guess, one of the first content creators to truly go viral in a way that made everyone sit up and take notice.

48:00Zing Tsjeng:People say he's the Mozart of the attention economy. So will he have the same legacy as Mozart, I wonder?

48:05Simon Jack:Will they be playing Mr Beast videos to small babies and toddlers to make them smarter? I don't actually think so. But I'm still going to give him a high point for legacy. I think I'm going to give him a six out of ten.

48:18Zing Tsjeng:So those are our scores. What do you think? Is he good, bad or just another billionaire? Let us know what you think. Email goodbadbillionaire, that's one word, at bbc.com. or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001 917 686 1176 and tell us what you think.

48:36Simon Jack:And don't forget to include your name as we may read it out on a future episode.

48:41Zing Tsjeng:For example, James from Florida emailed us, Hi Simon and Zing, love your podcast and I listen during my evening neighbourhood walks here in central Florida. It makes my daily 7 ,000 step target go by much faster. Glad to hear it. I just finished the episode on Rupert Murdoch's story and found the quote about 90 % of the best deals are offered to the top 2%. Quite striking. Nobody's been calling me with deals and now I know why. Same.

49:05Simon Jack:He goes on to say, following that, I was wondering if you could look into whether Dolly Parton is a legitimate billionaire. We love her upbeat personality, her positive approach to life, and she scored big on her rags to riches journey. We even visited Dollywood during a recent visit to Tennessee. Great place, highly recommend it. Oh, I wish I could go. I have shared your podcast with many friends and family members. Thank you, James. So once you reach a billion listeners, I'll be looking forward to that signed autograph card. All the best from Central Florida. Keep the shows rolling out.

49:34Zing Tsjeng:Well, thanks for that. And we looked into this. Unfortunately, Dolly is not yet a billionaire. She's worth around$500 million. So she's halfway there.

49:43Simon Jack:But there's still time, Dolly. Working nine to five.

49:47Zing Tsjeng:OK, so who have we got next episode?

49:49Simon Jack:We have got the youngest self-made female billionaire, and she pioneered this industry that is absolutely booming in the States right now, prediction market.

49:59Zing Tsjeng:So this is where you can trade whether events happen or not, almost anything, whether a president wins an election or indeed gets ousted from power.

50:10Simon Jack:Or which designer a celebrity is wearing on the red carpet.

50:14Zing Tsjeng:Who's going to be the next Bond? You name it. Everything is tradable. Yeah, and her name is Luana Lopez Lara. She's next up on Good Bad Billionaire. Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Hannah Hufford. The editor is Paul Smith, and it's a BBC Studios production.

50:32Simon Jack:For the BBC World Service, the senior commissioning producer is Sarah Green, and the commissioning editor is John Manel.

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