MrBeast has revealed the reason why he has ‘less than a million dollars in the bank’ despite being a billionaire ‘on paper’.
The YouTuber is known for his over-the-top challenge videos involving high budgets competitions with huge cash prizes.
And after it was revealed that his recent game show on Amazon Prime, Beast Games, had a budget of a whopping $100 million, you’d be forgiven for thinking he had a lot in the bank.
However, MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has said that he isn’t even a millionaire when it comes to his bank statements.
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He appeared in a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett where the YouTuber was open about his low bank balance.
When Bartlett asked if he was a billionaire, Donaldson replied: “On paper, yeah, but I mean, in my actual bank account, I have less than a million dollars.”
And the content creator went on to explain the reason for this, sharing that he invests a lot of his income back into his brand and he only pays himself enough money to live on each month.
Bartlett asked Donaldson if he pays himself to which the YouTuber responded with: “A little bit but I have some assistants and things like that so I try to pay myself what I spend personally a month just to stay even.
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“Money is fuel to grow a business.”
During the podcast, Donaldson also revealed that his game show was actually not a ‘good financial decision’ for him.
Bartlett asked the YouTuber: “How out of pocket are you?”
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Donaldson responded with: “Tens of millions, yeah, it was not a good financial decision to make Beast Games, I lost money.
“I would have more money if I didn’t film it.”
But when asked if he had any regrets, Donaldson shook his head.
He continued: “No, no, it’s great. For me, it was about making season one as good as possible, you know I can’t let the YouTube Community down because creators don’t have a good rep when it comes to doing stuff on streaming platforms and I’m getting 200 million views a video on average over the course of the first year and I’m going to talk to these stream platforms and they're like, ‘we’ve been burned by creators before’.”
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He went on to add: “I already know of two creators that have signed deals just on the backend
success of Beast Games and probably, I mean hundreds of millions of dollars is going to flow into creators’ pockets just because of Beast Games in the next year.”