mr.beast

History

Donaldson began posting videos to YouTube in 2012 at age 13 under the handle “MrBeast6000”; his early content ranged from lets plays to “videos estimating the wealth of other YouTubers”. However, his videos remained in relative obscurity — averaging around a thousand views each – until the release of his 2017 “counting to 100,000” video that earned tens of thousands of views in just a few days.

Content and style

Donaldson’s videos typically feature “attention-grabbing stunts”. He often makes videos on donating thousands of dollars to Twitch streamers, many of these videos being sponsored (although he has donated without a sponsor in the past). In January 2017, Donaldson published an almost day-long video of himself counting to 100,000. The stunt took him 40 hours, with some parts sped up to “keep it under 24 hours”.

Donaldson was born on May 7, 1998. He resides in Greenville, North Carolina, and graduated from the Greenville Christian Academy in 2016. According to Newsweek, Donaldson dropped out of college in order to pursue a full-time career as a YouTuber. During an online interview with Keemstar, Donaldson said that he has Crohn’s disease.

Team Trees

On October 25, 2019 at 19:00 UTC, Donaldson and former NASA engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober organised a collaborative fundraising challenge event on YouTube called #TeamTrees. The goal of this project was to raise $20 million for the Arbor Day Foundation by January 1, 2020 and plant trees “no later than December 2022”. In exchange, the organization would plant one tree for each dollar raised. Every donation goes to the Arbor Day Foundation which pledges to plant one tree for every dollar.