The Smell of Money
In an undisclosed warehouse on the outskirts of Greenville, North Carolina — a town of 89,000 bisected by the Tar River, better known for pharmaceutical plants and forklift manufacturers than for anything resembling Hollywood — there is a steel-plated closet guarded by a former physical therapist named Tracy. Tracy has bright blue eyes and an eastern Carolina twang and happens to be the stepfather of the closet's owner, which is a detail that matters because it tells you something about the nature of this particular empire: it is a family operation that happens to traffic in millions of dollars in cash, stacked in filing cabinets, all in ones. The ones take up more space. They look better on camera.
When a Rolling Stone reporter visited in 2022, the closet held approximately $900,000 — the remaining $100,000 was already en route to Florida, where it would be used to fund a "Would You Rather" video involving sharks, alligators, and a decision nobody should have to make. The reporter described the smell of the money as "crisp and pungent, like a pile of autumn leaves or a Xerox machine on the fritz," and admitted to feeling lightheaded. Tracy and the kid who built all of this — rangy, six-foot-five, apple-cheeked, wearing Adidas sneakers and a gray Nike sweatsuit, looking less like a mogul than like someone who might bag your groceries with genuine enthusiasm — were unmoved. "Yeah, we're numb," Jimmy Donaldson said.
He is twenty-seven years old. He has 460 million YouTube subscribers, which is larger than the population of the United States and roughly equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. His holding company, Beast Industries, generated more than $450 million in revenue last year and is seeking investment at a valuation of approximately $5 billion. He has given away more than $300 million worth of food through his nonprofit. He is raising money for his wedding by borrowing from his mother, because he has, by his own account, negative money in the bank. Everything goes back into the machine. Every dollar is a seed for the next video, and every video is a seed for the next dollar, and the cycle has been running at increasing velocity since he was thirteen years old, sitting in his mother's house in Greenville, uploading Minecraft commentary to a channel called MrBeast6000 — a name his Xbox randomly generated — because he could not stop thinking about YouTube, because he has never been able to stop thinking about YouTube, because his brain, as he puts it, is wired for obsession, and the obsession found its object before he could shave.
This is the paradox at the center of Jimmy Donaldson's life: he built an empire on generosity — on the viral spectacle of giving away houses and cars and private islands, on funding cataract surgeries for a thousand blind people, on planting twenty-three million trees — and yet the machine that enables that generosity requires a form of self-sacrifice so total that it resembles, from certain angles, something closer to self-annihilation. He rates his current mental health a five out of ten. He says the average person would be miserable living his life. He told the Diary of a CEO podcast in early 2025 that he has been more unhappy than happy so far this year. And then he said: "You gotta control your thoughts. You want success, you want to change the world? This is the price you have to pay."
By the Numbers
The Beast Industries Empire
460M+YouTube subscribers (main channel)
$450M+Annual revenue across all ventures (2024)
~$5BTarget valuation for current funding round
$300M+Worth of food donated through Beast Philanthropy
$3–4MCost to produce a single YouTube video
$110MNet losses in 2024 (reinvestment-driven)
95B+Lifetime views across all channels
A Boy with an Obsessive Personality and a Secondhand Laptop
The family moved constantly. Susan Parisher — Jimmy's mother, the second of her three children's primary parent after a marriage she has described as physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive — served as a military prison warden near Mannheim, Germany, before being stationed at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where Jimmy was born on May 7, 1998. She often worked twelve-hour days. A series of au pairs cared for the children. By the time Jimmy was seven, they had lived in three cities. His parents divorced in 2007. He is not in contact with his father.
Greenville, North Carolina, is where the constant movement stopped, or at least slowed enough for a boy to form a self. Donaldson has said he has no vivid memories of his life before age eleven, which is approximately the age at which he discovered YouTube — the platform was itself only five years old — and which is also the age at which his memory, and his identity, appear to begin. He played baseball and basketball. He fixated on LEGO toys. He described himself, in a documentary for Curiosity Stream, as having "an obsessive personality," a tendency to latch onto something and drain it of all available information before moving on, except that YouTube was the thing he latched onto and never moved on from. He was thirteen when he started uploading, in February 2012, using a secondhand laptop. His early output was undistinguished: Let's Play videos, Minecraft commentary, Call of Duty footage overlaid with the ramblings of a teenager who hadn't yet figured out what he had to say but knew, with a conviction that unnerved the people around him, that this platform was where he would say it.
"People would tell me, 'All you do is talk about YouTube videos. You're too obsessed with YouTube. Get a life,'" he recalled in an interview with the content creators Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry. The word "obsessed" appeared to function, in his retelling, not as a criticism he internalized but as a diagnosis he accepted. He studied the platform the way an aspiring chess grandmaster studies openings — not casually, but with the systematic intensity of someone who believes that every variable is knowable if you look long enough. What thumbnails generate clicks. What lighting. What pacing. What language. What camera angles. How many cuts per minute. He spent years — from age thirteen to roughly eighteen — in what amounted to a self-directed apprenticeship, one that produced negligible income and a subscriber count that, by July 2016, had crawled to 100,000. Five years for a hundred thousand. Then the curve broke.
He graduated from Greenville Christian Academy in 2016. His mother wanted him to attend college, so he enrolled at East Carolina University, the large public school a few miles from home. He lasted two weeks. He did not go to class. He sat in his car in the parking lot, editing videos. When he dropped out, his mother kicked him out of the house.
People would tell me, "All you do is talk about YouTube videos. You're too obsessed with YouTube. Get a life."
There is a particular American archetype here — the dropout who bets on himself, the garage tinkerer, the kid who sees what the adults cannot — and it would be easy to slot Donaldson into that mythology without qualification. But the details resist the simplification. He was not a visionary ignoring convention from a position of security. He was a kid with Crohn's disease — diagnosed at fifteen, an autoimmune condition that causes inflammation in the digestive tract, that cost him fifty pounds and ended his athletic career — living in a modest house in a mid-sized Carolina town, raised by a single mother who had escaped an abusive marriage, with no connections to media or technology or money. The obsession was not charming. It was isolating. He described himself as a "freak of nature" at school. The bet he placed on himself was not a calculated risk so much as the only option available to a mind that could not be redirected.
The One Hundred Thousand Problem
In January 2017, MrBeast uploaded a video titled "I Counted to 100,000!" The premise was exactly what it sounds like: Donaldson, eighteen years old, sat in front of a camera and counted, aloud, from one to one hundred thousand. The video runs over twenty-four hours. It is, by any conventional standard of entertainment, unwatchable — a marathon of monotony, a durational performance that would not be out of place in a downtown Manhattan gallery if it weren't being uploaded to a platform dominated by gaming compilations and makeup tutorials. It went viral. Not because it was good in any recognizable way, but because it was so audaciously pointless, so committed to its own absurd premise, that it became impossible to ignore. It was a purple cow.
Donaldson has since articulated this insight with the clarity of someone who arrived at it through years of empirical testing rather than theoretical reasoning. "If you're driving down the road, and you see a cow, who cares? It's a cow," he told the
Diary of a CEO podcast. "But if you're driving down the road, and you see a purple cow, you've never seen that before.… You're going to go, 'Holy shit.' You're going to tell your friend about it." The analogy is borrowed — Seth Godin published
Purple Cow in 2003 — but Donaldson's application of it is original, and it has become the governing principle of his entire creative and commercial enterprise: every video must do something that has never been done. If someone else has done it, even slightly differently, "it doesn't feel as special." The counting video was his proof of concept. Nobody else had done it because it was insane to do. That was the point.
Within months, Donaldson had refined the formula. He convinced an early sponsor, Quidd — a now-defunct digital collectibles app — to give him money, and instead of pocketing it, he gave it away on camera. He handed cash to Twitch streamers, to pizza delivery drivers, to Uber drivers, to a homeless man on a median strip. He was nineteen. The videos performed. The sponsorship money grew. He reinvested every dollar into more ambitious giveaways, which generated more views, which attracted more sponsors, which funded larger giveaways. The flywheel was spinning.
What distinguished Donaldson from the thousands of other creators attempting some version of this loop was not just the scale of his generosity but the sophistication of his understanding of the platform's mechanics. He was not simply making videos; he was conducting experiments. He tracked audience retention curves — the graphs YouTube provides showing exactly when viewers click away — with the granularity of a quantitative researcher. He studied what he calls "mass psychological behavior," the patterns of human attention that the algorithm, in his view, merely reflects. "The more you study YouTube, the more you realize I should be studying humans and what they like," he has said, "because the algorithm just rewards giving people what they want to watch."
The Thousand-Day Mastermind
For one thousand consecutive days, starting roughly around his viral breakthrough, Donaldson participated in daily mastermind calls with a small group of fellow YouTube creators. One thousand days. Not business quarters, not semester schedules — one thousand consecutive sunrises spent dissecting thumbnails, retention curves, title psychology, the granular mechanics of what makes a human being click, and stay, and come back. The group included several creators who would go on to build significant channels of their own, but the intensity of the commitment was distinctly Donaldson's. He has described these calls as the single most transformative practice of his career, the thing that took him from an awkward teenager with eight thousand subscribers to the most-watched human on the planet.
The practice reveals something essential about his method. Donaldson is not, in the conventional sense, a creative genius — he does not possess the singular artistic vision of a filmmaker or the improvisational brilliance of a comedian. What he possesses is a relentless empiricism, a willingness to treat content creation as a falsifiable science rather than an expressive art. He gathers data. He tests hypotheses. He iterates. And he does this not in isolation but in structured collaboration with peers who share his intensity, which is itself a form of genius — the genius of knowing what kind of intelligence you need and building a system to cultivate it.
The leaked production handbook — a thirty-six-page document titled "How to Succeed in MrBeast Production," verified by Business Insider through former staffers — reads less like an employee manual and more like the operating principles of a high-frequency trading desk translated into the language of a twenty-six-year-old who does not distinguish between work and life. "Our videos are hard and if you took the difficulty of our videos … you'd see they are only getting harder," Donaldson wrote. "This is why I want the best in the world and people who are obsessed." And: "I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn't stop you from making this video on time." And: "Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error."
The document also contained characteristically practical advice about saving money — instead of offering $20,000 in cash as a challenge prize, he suggested, MrBeast could give away "a year's supply of Doritos" (defined as five bags per day for 365 days) for a fraction of the cost with the same shock value. This is not stinginess. It is the logic of a person who understands that every dollar saved on one video is a dollar that can be spent making the next video more ambitious, and that the audience cares about the spectacle of the number, not the denomination. Employees, he noted, would be "judged on results, not hours."
The Economics of Impossibility
The math of MrBeast's core business is, by any traditional standard, deranged. YouTube's Partner Program typically pays creators between one and five dollars per thousand views. Even at Donaldson's scale — videos that routinely draw 250 million views — that translates to roughly $1.25 million per video in advertising revenue. His production costs run $3 to $4 million per video. He spends up to $4 million a month on production alone. The main channel, the engine of the entire enterprise, operates at a loss.
This is not a bug. It is the strategy.
Donaldson understood, earlier and more completely than almost anyone in the creator economy, that YouTube videos are not the product. They are the marketing. The product is everything else: the audience itself, the attention it represents, and the businesses that can be built on top of that attention. If just one percent of the people who watch a MrBeast video buy a three-dollar chocolate bar, that is $7.5 million in revenue — at margins that dwarf anything YouTube advertising can provide.
Feastables, the chocolate company he cofounded in 2022 with Jim Murray, hit $200 million in annual revenue faster than any other consumer packaged goods brand in history, according to reporting from multiple outlets, and it accomplished this while spending "virtually nothing" on advertising and marketing. The product is stocked at Walmart, Target, and CVS. It is distributed internationally. Its cocoa is 100% Fairtrade certified, and the company pays farmers the living income reference price or market price, whichever is higher — a commitment Donaldson has linked to his own journey with Crohn's disease, which inspired the original "better-for-you" snack premise. The chocolate funds the videos. The videos sell the chocolate. The flywheel, again.
Beast Industries — the holding company that owns all or part of Feastables, the snack company Lunchly (a joint venture with Logan Paul and KSI, positioned as a Lunchables competitor), MrBeast's video production company, and an expanding portfolio of other assets — generated more than $450 million in revenue in 2024. It also lost $110 million that year, because Donaldson continues to pour capital into content at rates that would terrify any CFO who hadn't already been converted to his religion of reinvestment. "I like money because I can hire more people and grow a business," he told the podcaster Sam Parr, "but not so I can increase my lifestyle."
I lost tens of millions of dollars on Beast Games. But it's about making Season 1 as good as possible.
The Amazon deal made this logic visible at television scale. Beast Games — a reality competition featuring one thousand contestants competing for $5 million, the largest cash prize in television history — cost $100 million to produce in its first season, making it the most expensive unscripted show ever made. Amazon committed the budget, but Donaldson spent beyond it, absorbing the overrun personally. "I lost tens of millions of dollars on Beast Games," he said on the Diary of a CEO. "But it's about making Season 1 as good as possible." The show became Prime Video's most-watched unscripted series ever, in eighty countries. Amazon agreed to produce additional seasons, with the original deal calling for more than $250 million across two more.
Greenville, or the Refusal to Leave
There is a detail about MrBeast that gets mentioned in virtually every profile but whose significance is rarely explored: he still lives in Greenville, North Carolina. Not in Los Angeles, where the creator economy's infrastructure is concentrated. Not in New York, where the media and financial establishment resides. Not in Miami, where the tax advantages lure entrepreneurs and the nightlife lures everyone else. Greenville. Population 89,000. Home to East Carolina University, Hyster-Yale forklifts, and Grady-White boats.
He operates out of a $14 million, 63,000-square-foot studio complex on the outskirts of town, supplemented by a 50,000-square-foot warehouse called Studio C where his team constructs the dream-like sets that appear in his videos — recreations of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, ten-story video game monsters, giant dominoes. Through an entity called Creative Grid LLC, he has purchased an additional 123 acres of land around the complex. Pitt County officials distribute "planned pyrotechnics" notices over email and Facebook, instructing homeowners not to call the police when the explosions start. He has bought a string of houses in a neighborhood where some of his employees, family, and friends reside. His mother serves as Beast Industries' chief compliance officer, managing the company's expenditures and contracts. His stepfather Tracy guards the cash closet.
The decision to stay is often framed as humility, and there is probably an element of that — Donaldson does live modestly by the standards of someone whose net worth is estimated at $2.6 billion — but it also functions as a competitive advantage. Labor is cheaper in Greenville than in LA. Real estate is cheaper. There are fewer distractions, fewer competing influences, fewer opportunities to get pulled into the social ecosystem of the creator economy, which is itself a kind of attention trap. Greenville is a place where you can build a fifty-foot set without anyone telling you it's impractical, because the local economic development authority is still trying to figure out what category your business falls into. "He's operating in a new industry that even the state and localities are still trying to grasp how do we best help," said Josh Lewis, president of the Greenville ENC Alliance.
The town has been transformed. Luxury sports cars zip through streets that used to see only pickup trucks. Local restaurants have become virtual MrBeast Burger fulfillment centers. Bret Oliverio, owner of the popular downtown bar Sup Dogs, estimated that roughly a hundred of his employees have appeared in MrBeast videos, "with more than a few winning." The local fire department, the county government, the university — all have been pulled into the orbit of a twenty-seven-year-old who generates more annual revenue than most of the town's traditional employers combined. It is as though someone built a mid-budget film studio in the middle of a tobacco field and then, gradually, the field rearranged itself around the studio.
The Philanthropy Problem
On the surface, MrBeast's charitable work is staggering and uncomplicated. Through his nonprofit, Beast Philanthropy, he has distributed more than 42 million meals and over $300 million worth of food. He has donated $5 million in aid to Ukrainian refugees. He has funded 2,000 prosthetics, 100 cleft palate surgeries, and 600 e-bikes for people in need. He paid for cataract surgeries to help 1,000 people see again, a video that ranks among his most-viewed. His #TeamTrees campaign, created in collaboration with Mark Rober — the former NASA engineer and YouTuber who wrote the TIME 100 entry praising Donaldson's ability to "break a complex problem down to first principles" — raised over $20 million for reforestation. His #TeamSeas campaign raised $30 million to remove plastic from the ocean. His most recent effort, #TeamWater, raised over $41 million to provide clean drinking water across Africa and Southeast Asia, drawing support from more than 100,000 individual donors plus multimillion-dollar contributions from Google, TikTok, and Accenture.
Rober — who spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designing instruments for the Mars Curiosity rover before becoming one of YouTube's most popular science communicators — described Donaldson's optimism as "infectious" and his ambitions as impervious to small thinking. "I don't know what he'll do 10 years down the road," Rober wrote, "but I know it won't be status quo."
But the philanthropy is also content. The surgeries are filmed. The meals are counted on camera. The generosity is, inextricably, the product — and this fusion has attracted criticism that Donaldson has never fully resolved. Some critics argue that offering vulnerable people cash in exchange for demanding physical or mental challenges is ethically murky, regardless of the outcome. Others object to the spectacularization of charity itself, the transformation of human need into entertainment commodity. The argument is not that the people helped are worse off — they are demonstrably not — but that something is lost when compassion requires a camera crew and a thumbnail.
Donaldson is aware of this tension. "If you want to be liked, don't help people," he told the Diary of a CEO, a line that sounds like a joke until you consider the volume of criticism he absorbs. His response has been less to argue against the criticism than to outscale it — to give away so much, at such volume, that the ethical quibbles become, in proportion, minor footnotes to an overwhelming material reality. Jeff Housenbold, the Silicon Valley veteran Donaldson hired as CEO of Beast Industries, articulated the company's position with the clarity of someone who has spent a career monetizing attention: "Can we combine capitalism and altruism in a way that's a win-win? We believe the answer is yes."
Housenbold's hire — and the fact that Donaldson insisted the executive meet his mother before accepting the job — signals something about the maturation of the enterprise. Beast Industries now has the infrastructure of a real corporation: a CEO, plans for a chief human resources officer, a chief financial officer, and general counsel. It has institutional investors, including the New York-based firm Alpha Wave Global. It has compliance structures and employee handbooks and mandatory sensitivity training. The kid who edited videos in his car in the ECU parking lot now oversees hundreds of employees and an entity whose organizational complexity rivals a mid-cap public company.
The Controversies, or the Cost of Scale
In the summer of 2024, the machine cracked.
Ava Kris Tyson — a longtime collaborator and one of Donaldson's earliest creative partners — was accused of sharing inappropriate sexual messages with minors. Tyson left the company in July after the accusations surfaced online. Donaldson said he was "disgusted and opposed to such unacceptable acts" and hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to investigate. Then old videos surfaced of Donaldson himself making racially insensitive and homophobic remarks — clips from years earlier, from the era of crude early YouTube when such language was more common but no less corrosive. He apologized, calling his past language "inappropriate."
Then came Beast Games. Around 2,000 contestants gathered in Las Vegas for the filming of the first season. Some eliminated contestants described miserable conditions inside the Las Vegas Raiders football stadium: delayed access to medications, inadequate meals, injuries from physical challenges. The New York Times documented the reports. Five contestants filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon and two Raleigh-based companies tied to the series, alleging lack of food, sexual harassment, and mischaracterization as volunteers during the shoot. Donaldson described the complaints on X as "blown out of proportion." Amazon declined to comment.
A confidential memo, obtained by the Associated Press, revealed the scope of Donaldson's internal response. Addressed to "Team Beast" employees, it announced a "full assessment of internal culture" and an investigation into "allegations of inappropriate behavior by people in the company." It outlined plans to hire a chief human resources officer, a chief financial officer, and general counsel, and to implement mandatory training on "safety, sexual harassment, LGBTQ, diversity, sensitivity training, and workplace conduct." An anonymous reporting mechanism would be established. "As your leader, I take responsibility," Donaldson wrote, "and I am committed to continue to improve and evolve my leadership style. I recognize that I also need to create a culture that makes all our employees feel safe and allows them to do their best work."
The memo read like the announcement of a company growing up in public — the confession that an enterprise built by a teenager, run on vibes and obsessive energy and the charisma of a single individual, had outgrown the informal structures that sustained it. Jake Bjorseth, founder of the Gen Z advertising agency Trndsttrs, noted the particular difficulty of managing a company where "an individual is the brand." The brand cannot fire itself. The brand cannot be distanced from the controversy. The brand is a twenty-seven-year-old man who built everything on the force of his personality and is now discovering that personality, however magnetic, is not a substitute for institutional governance.
The Disney Ambition
Donaldson has said, in multiple interviews, that he wants to build something that one day rivals Disney. The comparison sounds grandiose — it is grandiose — but it is not empty. Disney, at its origin, was one man's obsessive vision scaled through relentless reinvestment:
Walt Disney famously mortgaged his house to fund
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the animated film that every expert said would fail. Donaldson mortgages nothing because he owns nothing to mortgage. He borrows from his mother.
The parallels are instructive but imperfect. Disney built on intellectual property — characters, stories, worlds that outlived their creator and could be endlessly repurposed. Donaldson's empire is built on a single personality: his own face, his own voice, his own manic energy in the first five seconds of every video. The localized channel offshoots — which show his videos with Hindi, Spanish, and other non-English voiceovers — attempt to decouple the content from the English language, but they cannot decouple it from the man. The Saudi Arabian theme park, Beast Land, opening in late 2025, represents another attempt at extension — physical experiences modeled on his videos — but the question of what MrBeast is without MrBeast remains unanswered.
The forthcoming novel, coauthored with James Patterson, suggests an awareness of the problem. So does the acquisition, in February 2026, of Step — a teen-focused digital banking platform previously backed by Justin Timberlake, Will Smith, and Stephen Curry — which will be folded into a new division called MrBeast Financial. The trademark filing covers nine potential financial offerings, including student loans, insurance, and cryptocurrency products, all targeting his predominantly young male audience. "I saw the Step acquisition as an opportunity to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had," Donaldson wrote on social media.
A content creator building a bank. A YouTuber offering student loans. The instinct is to laugh, and the instinct is wrong. Donaldson's audience is larger than the customer base of most financial institutions. His trust metrics among Gen Z and Gen Alpha — the cohorts that will constitute the next generation of financial consumers — likely exceed those of any traditional bank. The question is not whether he has the audience, but whether he can navigate the regulatory infrastructure of financial services, which requires licenses, compliance structures, and capital requirements that make chocolate bars look like a lemonade stand.
I want to be the biggest YouTube channel ever.… I just want it. It just gives me something to strive for, to get out of bed and grind for.
The [Attention](/mental-models/attention) Cathedral
Mark O'Connell, writing in
The Guardian in June 2025, called Donaldson "the
Mozart of the attention economy" — a phrase that sounds like satire but was deployed with genuine analytical intent. O'Connell, a mid-forties literary journalist and National Book Award finalist, admitted to finding MrBeast's videos "highly entertaining" and confessed that the admission itself felt like a concession, as though enjoying a MrBeast video were something a person of his cultural station ought to resist. He then described hearing, from Egyptians in Alexandria, that the country's tourist trade was experiencing a significant upswing attributable to the release of
I Spent 100 Hours Inside the Pyramids! — a video that had accumulated 194 million views and counting, and in which Donaldson and his crew were granted unprecedented access to the deep interiors of the Giza pyramids.
A YouTube video boosting the Egyptian tourism economy. The sentence itself is a kind of proof: the scale of Donaldson's influence has exceeded the container of the medium that created it, leaking into physical geography, into national economies, into the material world in ways that resist neat categorization. He is not a television host. He is not a filmmaker. He is not a philanthropist, or a CEO, or an influencer, or an entrepreneur, though he is all of these things in some measure. What he is, most precisely, is a systems designer — someone who has reverse-engineered human attention at a scale that was not possible before the platform era and who has built an increasingly complex apparatus to harvest and redirect that attention toward his own expanding ambitions.
"At this point we kind of know what does well," he told TIME in 2024. "I can make almost anything go viral." The statement is not boastful so much as diagnostic. Virality, for Donaldson, is not magic. It is engineering. And the engineering is getting harder — his fans, he has acknowledged, are growing "numb" to spectacle, requiring ever-greater novelty, ever-higher stakes, ever more ambitious purple cows to sustain the same level of engagement. This is the treadmill of attention economics: you must accelerate to stay in place.
The Price
Two percent of humanity's time is currently spent on YouTube. Donaldson mentioned this statistic in a 2025 interview with Mashable, and he mentioned it not with alarm but with satisfaction, because he fell in love with the platform at eleven years old and it turned out to be the thing that grew endlessly. "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was I fell in love with making YouTube videos," he said. "Over the last 16 years, certain mediums have died and YouTube has grown exponentially. I got very lucky that the thing I fell in love with, that I devoted my life to, happens to be growing endlessly."
The word "devoted" does work in that sentence that Donaldson may not have intended. Devotion implies sacrifice. Donaldson's devotion has cost him, by his own account: his health (the Crohn's, the mental health struggles, the admission that he would not wish his life on the average person), his anonymity (he has described hiding in airport janitor closets to avoid recognition, making strategic visits to police stations for safety), and something harder to name — the ordinary texture of a life lived without the mediation of a camera. He does not take vacations. He does not play the strategy board games he loves. He looks at his schedule and thinks, maybe in four days. "It's very easy to go in moments like that, 'F—, I feel like a zoo animal, I don't have free will, I'm like a little robot to my businesses.'"
He is engaged to Thea Booysen, a South African YouTuber, author, and Twitch streamer, and he has said the relationship improved his sleep and his focus — a revelation that surprised him, as he had long assumed romantic commitment would compromise productivity. He says he plans to do this for another thirty years. He wants a billion subscribers. He wants to change the world. He wants to build something that outlasts him.
On the outskirts of Greenville, in the field behind the studio, the pyrotechnics notices go out and the explosions rattle windows and nobody calls the police anymore because everyone knows it's just Jimmy making another video. The cash is stacked in the closet. Tracy is on duty. The smell of money fills the room, crisp and pungent, and nobody blinks.
