At 11:47 PM EST on Tuesday, Jimmy Donaldson โ known to 300 million people as MrBeast โ became the first creator in YouTube's 20-year history to surpass 300 million subscribers. He celebrated with a Shorts video filmed on a phone. It got 94 million views in 8 hours.
The milestone is not merely symbolic. It represents a concentration of audience so extreme that YouTube's own creator ecosystem researchers have described it, in internal documents seen by SocialSeconds, as a "concentration risk" โ the possibility that a single creator's departure from the platform could materially impact YouTube's engagement metrics and advertiser relationships.
The Empire Behind the Number
The 300 million subscriber count is just the beginning of the MrBeast story in 2026. The business empire Jimmy Donaldson has built around his channel includes: Beast Philanthropy (his charitable organization), Feastables (his chocolate brand, valued at $1.8B), Beast Burger (now a physical restaurant chain with 14 US locations), and MrBeast Studios, a production house that now works with Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+.