YouTube King MrBeast hopes to raise $200m, which will value his company Beast Industries at over $5bn.
In a weird inversion of the fictional family empire owned by Batman’s alter ego, Jimmy Donaldson has built his alter ego – MrBeast – into a real-world empire.
Next up for Beast Industries – about which The Verge has a fascinating article by Alex Heath based on an investor pitch – is selling things.
MrBeast awakens
“To justify that eye-popping valuation of at least $5 billion, investors are betting that the future of MrBeast’s business will be selling physical products, not making videos,” writes Heath.
The deck reveals that Beast Industries’ two main divisions – Content and Commerce – made $250m each in revenue in 2024, a 125% increase over 2023.
However, the content division “loses money thanks mainly to its staggering production costs, which were more than 90% of revenue last year”.
The commerce division sells mostly Feastables, MrBeast’s range of snacks, which began with a chocolate bar and a very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-esque campaign with ten grand winners who could compete in a video to win a whole chocolate factory.
Using his usual, very generous techniques, Donaldson sold $10m worth of chocolate bars in the first few months after the line’s launch in 2021. Last year’s sales saw an increase of 160% over 2023. This year, sales are projected to increase over 100%, according to The Verge.
To do this, Donaldson is looking to snacks, cereals, and beverages. “He’s also planning to launch a mobile gaming division next year. Management is telling investors to expect an initial public offering in two to three years,” Heath writes.
Interestingly, he adds, the chocolate brand’s revenue “matched the core video business in 2024 and is expected to exceed it” this year.
But Beast Industries “has never been profitable and doesn’t expect to be anytime soon. The company lost roughly $200m over the last few years alone,” he adds.
This year, Beast Industries expects to earn $900m and $1.6bn in 2026.
“These numbers show how MrBeast is running his company like his YouTube channel by spending everything he makes to fuel more topline growth.”
“For now, the strategy seems to be working. Even if he has hit the ceiling of what a creator can make from YouTube, Feastables is taking off. He’s the second-most-followed person in the world after Cristiano Ronaldo. And, while it was wildly expensive to make, his recent Beast Games reality show is already Amazon’s most-watched unscripted series ever.”
He points out that Donaldson doesn’t seem fazed by the stakes of what he’s building. “I don’t really feel risk,” he said on a recent Diary of a CEO podcast. “If anything, risk excites me. I have a high threshold for it.”
Not bad for a YouTuber who has truly worked out how to make the algorithms work for him.
