The richest YouTuber claims that he worked a minimum of 15 hours a day until he became a billionaire
American billionaire Jimmy Donaldson, better known by the nickname “MrBeast”, has spent the last decade climbing to the top of the most popular content creators online, but it has come at a major cost to his personal life, reports Fortune magazine.
YouTube's most popular content creator boasts a record 476 million subscribers on the platform alone – a feat achieved in part through increasingly extreme stunts, from spending a week living in a cave to even being buried in a coffin.
“I live to work and I 100% don't have a healthy work-life balance,” Donaldson wrote on the “X” platform after a docuseries titled “How MrBeast Works 18 Hour Days” was released and people commented on social media about the lack of balance in his life.
Donaldson said in the documentary that “it was a miracle if one day [de muncă] he had less than 15 hours for me,” adding that his schedule is “literally planned down to the minute.”
MrBeast claims to be a perfectionist
Along with filming the second installment of “Beast Games,” his competition series on Amazon Prime Video, Donaldson has also kept up the regular output of his high-budget YouTube videos, which frequently garner more than 100 million views.
“Everything has to be perfect because I don't have much time,” he said.
While not every day is as demanding for Donaldson as the one devoted to filming Beast Games, Fortune magazine notes that his pace reflects a larger ambition: He's not just making videos — he's building an entertainment empire under the umbrella of Beast Industries, one he said he hopes will one day rival Disney.
This expansion is now extending beyond content into areas such as financial services and telecommunications, further increasing the demands on his time.
Donaldson says that despite the success, he is short on cash
But despite building a business valued at $5 billion, Donaldson says that doesn't translate into personal cash flow, in part because he's reinvesting nearly all of BeastIndustries' money into growing the business.
He said in an interview published earlier this year by the Wall Street Journal: “Right now I'm in the black; I'm borrowing money. That's how little money I have. Technically speaking, everyone watching this video has more money in their bank account than I do, if you subtract the value of my stake in the company, which doesn't buy me a McDonald's in the morning.”
His comments came as Fortune magazine this year estimated his fortune at $2.6 billion.
Bloomberg made a similar assessment based on the value of BeastIndustries, but pointed out that Donaldson's money “is on paper”, that is, in the largest script given that his company is not listed on the stock exchange.
