Update | Who is MrBeast and why does he give away his millions on social media? How an Instagram post went super viral
- Through his alter ego MrBeast, YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson has built a multimillion-dollar empire. His May 2023 US$50,000 Instagram birthday giveaway went viral
Update: On May 7, his birthday, MrBeast posted on Instagram that he would give US$10,000 each to five followers who shared his post to their Instagram Stories and tagged someone in the comments section. He said he would choose the five winners of the money within 72 hours. His post has become one of the most liked and most commented upon ever on Instagram.
In an undisclosed location in the US state of North Carolina, Jimmy Donaldson is about to show me a million dollars in cash.
In one area, there are piles of GameStop merchandise from a video where he promised to buy everything a contestant could fit into a circumscribed triangle (“He just wanted cash instead,” Donaldson says); in another, crates stuffed with inflatable dinosaur costumes for a video titled Walking Into Random Stores With 100 Dinosaurs.
In the back, there are 1 billion Orbeez, tiny gel-filled pellets that Donaldson used to fill his best friend’s back garden for a video back in 2018.
Then, we come to the money. “If you wanted to rob us, here’s where you’d rob us,” Donaldson says. The cash is guarded by an affable man named Tracy Parisher; he is an operations manager at MrBeast YouTube LLC, and the stepfather of its founder.
