MrBeast: “if you want to be liked, don’t help people. I lost tens of millions in Beast Games”

MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, has become one of the best-known internet celebrities in the world thanks to his ultra successful YouTube channel, which has 366 million subscribers, more than any other on the platform. According to various estimates, he has a net worth of more than $1 billion, yet he revealed in a recent podcast appearance his life isn’t as rosy as it may seem.

Appearing on “The Diary of a CEO,” hosted by Steven Bartlett, MrBeast opened up about a number of difficult issues, including being the target of online criticism, being bullied during his teenage years, his mental health and suffering from Chron’s disease (a chronic autoimmune condition that inflames and irritates a person’s digestive tract).

MrBeast: “I work every hour my eyes are open”

“There are definitely times where I would cry. If my mental health were a priority, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am,” Donaldson explains. “I work every hour that my eyes are open. The average person wouldn’t want to live this life or be in my head because they’d be miserable working all the time and would probably wonder: Why do I work all the time?”

He confesses, however, that it’s impossible to have everything: “This is the life I chose. You want success, you want to change the world, you want to do this. And this is the price you have to pay”.

“Beast Games”: costly controversy

In 2024, MrBeast created “Beast Games,” a reality competition television series, shown on Amazon Prime Video, in which 1,000 contestants compete for up to $10 million by performing a series of challenges. If you missed it (the last episode was shown in mid-February), think Squid Game without the killings.

A unique way of helping people, including himself, of course, which he believes he isn’t given enough credit for. “The more good you do, the more people think you’re secretly evil,” MrBeast feels. “We’re now conditioned in the U.S. to think that when someone does something good, there’s always a hidden motive”.

Although “Beast Games” has become one of Amazon Prime Video’s most viewed shows, it has came with no shortage of controversy. Never mind poor reviews; a number of contests claim they were mistreated, including allegations of sexual harassment, during production, leading to Donaldson being one of the subjects of an ongoing class action lawsuit.

On top of that, MrBeast believes the show, in which he doubled the initial $5 million first prize out of his own pocket, has ended up costing him a whole lot more than that.

“I lost a ton of money filming the show, so that came out of my pocket”, Donaldson, revealing the series cost more than $100 million to make. “Yeah, we spent way too much money on it. I lost of tens of millions of dollars on that show... I’m an idiot”.

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