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Climbing to the top of the YouTube charts comes with a hefty price.
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MrBeast has built a YouTube empire on stunts — living in a cave, marooning himself on an island— pushing each idea further than the last. At 27, MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, boasts a record-setting 476 million subscribers and a work ethic to match.
Following last week’s release of a docuseries titled “How MrBeast Works 18 Hours Per Day,” Donaldson, the world’s top YouTuber by subscribers, weighed in on his lack of work-life balance.
“I live to work and 100% do not have a healthy work life balance,” Donaldson wrote in a post on X this week.
“It was a miracle if a day was less than 15 hours for me,” Donaldson said in the docuseries, noting that he plans his schedule “down to the minute.”
Donaldson had very little time to spare last summer, while filming the second season of his Amazon Prime competition show “Beast Games.” Still, he never slowed down on his main gig — churning out massive, high-budget YouTube videos that routinely top 100 million views.
The YouTube star drilled down on the smallest details, like video thumbnails. To get them just right, he hired a body double to test out concepts so he could swoop in for the perfect shot and move straight to his next project.
“Everything has to be perfect because I don’t have much time,” he said in the docuseries.
Donaldson’s pace reflects a bigger ambition. He is not just cranking out videos anymore — he is trying to turn his company, Beast Industries, into a full-blown entertainment giant to rival Disney one day.
Beast Industries is in growth mode. The company’s CEO, Silicon Valley veteran Jeff Housenbold, said this week in a LinkedIn post that he plans to boost headcount by 50%, hiring new employees in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Greenville, North Carolina headquarters where Donaldson grew up. The new roles span marketing, engineering and consumer products.
Beast Industries currently employs 450 people, more than 300 of whom create videos, according to Bloomberg. Donaldson owns a little over half of the $5 billion company, per Business Insider.
There were over 60 open positions on the Beast Industries website at the time of writing. One job posting for a senior recruiter based in New York advertised a total compensation package between $130,000 and $160,000, plus equity. The job listings prioritize years of work experience over formal education. Most roles do not require college degrees.
Even though his business is valued at $5 billion, Donaldson claims that value has not turned into cash in his own pocket.
“I have negative money right now. I’m borrowing money. That’s how little money I have,” Donaldson told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. “I’m just so busy working, I don’t really think about my personal bank account. I’m just laser-focused on making the greatest videos as possible, and building the business as big as possible.”
Donaldson’s net worth is $2.6 billion, according to a Fortune estimate from earlier this year.
Donaldson isn’t the only leader who has an extreme work schedule. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who leads the most valuable company in the world, told The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in December that he works seven days a week, “every moment” he is awake, in a “state of anxiety” over Nvidia potentially going bankrupt. He starts his day at 4 a.m. and works on holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving.
“To live on fumes at all times,” Huang told the podcast. “The feeling, no different from the feeling I had this morning when I woke up: ‘You’re going to be out of business soon.’”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a similarly intense work schedule. At a conference in November 2022, Musk shared that he once lived in Tesla’s factories in Fremont and Nevada for three years. He claimed he slept on the floor of the factories, which was “uncomfortable,” but the point was to show his employees that he was dedicated to the company’s success.
Musk also said on a 2024 episode of the podcast In Good Company that he would work “every waking hour” for years at a time to get a business off the ground.
“I’ve done many, many stretches of 100-hour weeks, where roughly six hours per day is sleeping,” Musk said on the podcast. “I would not recommend that. That’s for emergencies.”
Other leaders, however, emphasize the importance of work-life balance. One such CEO is Karri Saarinen, who leads the $1.25 billion project management startup Linear. Saarinen told Entrepreneur last year that he asks employees to work the standard 40 hours a week and offers five weeks of paid time off per year. He says companies that adopt grueling work schedules risk burning out staff in search of speed.
“People are rushing too much and launching things that don’t quite work,” he told Entrepreneur. “In our company, we always try to err on the side of quality, not quantity.”
MrBeast has built a YouTube empire on stunts — living in a cave, marooning himself on an island— pushing each idea further than the last. At 27, MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, boasts a record-setting 476 million subscribers and a work ethic to match.
Following last week’s release of a docuseries titled “How MrBeast Works 18 Hours Per Day,” Donaldson, the world’s top YouTuber by subscribers, weighed in on his lack of work-life balance.
“I live to work and 100% do not have a healthy work life balance,” Donaldson wrote in a post on X this week.
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