Could MrBeast Be the First YouTuber Billionaire? | Forbes

I just obsess over and I obsess over until I fall asleep and I dream about it and then I wake up and I do it again building this business is Like Cocaine to me I just don't know how to stop [Music] I basically spent five years of my life when I was a teenager just obsessively studying YouTube watching YouTube 10 hours a day obsessing over it like if a video got 40 million views figuring out why and doing that just literally tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of times to the point where you know

I was basically just kind of a YouTube loser and this was back when YouTube wasn't cool no one in my entire School wanted to make content I had no equipment my brother had a really old hand-me-down laptop that I just would kind of steal at night I didn't have a microphone I didn't have anything and I had no one to teach me so it was a long brutal process from like 11 to basically when I was 19 years old things started to take off a little bit but every comment was like get better quality get

better audio you know I had to just slowly just build up money to buy the equipment I had to sort of train myself how to edit to do the camera be entertaining make videos people like I basically got a hundred thousand subscribers filming on a like a hand-me-down iPhone I don't mind talking to a camera I find that fun it's actually more difficult for me to talk to people there were actual points in my life where my family thought it was me which later on in life I learned it's because I couldn't find people I

related to and no one around me was obsessed over business and content and the things I was assessed over I just didn't know how to speak normal teenager language when I was a teenager I just couldn't figure it out it just it was crippling boring and my brain would just be like this is my numbing I want to figure out how we become successful and build a business and stuff like that I thought I was just like a [ __ ] loser that would never be able to talk to anyone and never know how to

speak to anyone but really I just learned that I just there's just certain people that I get along well with and it's like it's just a very small section of the human population when I'm around those people life is amazing [Music] the beauty of YouTube which I think does it better than anyone else is the algorithm is so refined where your YouTube account is just what YouTube thinks you'll watch which is very accurate you don't even really study the algorithm anymore you just kind of study what do people want to watch if you want to

get 100 million views on video you don't go how can I trick YouTube to serving this to 100 million people it's just not going to happen you just think how do I make something that 100 million people will want to watch and then YouTube will give it to them with the data tells them that 100 million people want to watch it if I see an idea I can just tell like yes 100 million people would want to watch that or no like that's more like something that a little more Niche but it would kill that

Niche and then but that's probably like 10 million views or 20. you know what I mean we work on videos probably three or four months in advance so from start to when they get uploaded it's probably like one to two months coming up with the idea three to four months working on the idea and then a couple weeks filming and then like three weeks editing so probably five months from start to finish two years ago we were spending 100 Grand a video now we're spending probably 1.5 million in a video for me it comes pretty

easily it's just I don't think the video is great just don't upload it I mean it's the beauty of not really doing things for money like if I don't think the audience will like it it's gone I just don't need a mansion to be happy I don't need a Supercar to be happy I don't I don't really need anything outside of this you know as long as I have a bed in a bathroom I'm fine because of that I don't have any liabilities outside of the company so I can just reinvest it all because like

I don't have to have the fear of well if things don't work out but I can't maintain my crazy lifestyle or my down payment each month's like 50 Grand on my five supercars and a hundred thousand dollars on this shine mansion and insurance and all this other stuff and I have to maintain 30 Maids or whatever it is you know the crazy stuff people end up getting into so to me money is just fuel to grow the business and help people and not much else Beast Burger we launched during covid and so this is when

restaurants were shutting down left and right there's lockdowns like everyone was switching over to delivery the Big Driver was really wanted to just help a lot of restaurants generate extra Revenue because you know by the time they take home their pay and the delivery apps take their fee and everything it's not like the profit margins are that great on it it's more to help other people like I haven't taken a single dollar out of it we just reinvested all over there with Beast Burger that's why I'm really trying to figure out how we can get

more people eating something like impossible meat or right now we're looking at the into lab grow meat and stuff like that I would personally love to switch over to one of these soon if we just but I don't want it to just switch over and then we don't sell any and then it does no good it's gonna be like feasibles where it's people are actually buying it so it actually makes a change one thing I noticed is you know I could go stand in any Walmart in America and random people come up and ask for

a photo or I could go stand in Target or a gas station anywhere it just kind of clicked once we started putting these in retail those same people that if I stand there we'll ask for a photo they'll also buy our product I wanted to just make a better for you snack brand because I think a lot of the stuff out there is just terrible for you like the first cereal one of the products I'm going to do next right like you have the Lucky Charms that are like 250 a box and I mean God

knows how many ingredients are in like box of lucky charm but then you have stuff like magic spoon which is you know infinitely better for you and and good like it's not going to kill you to eat but it's also like really really expensive you know and so like this is like a perfect example where I want to live in the middle and help bring that high quality low ingredients good for you down to more like a four dollar or five dollar price range and put my brand behind it so people eat it and if

they do that then I can sleep well at night because it's a net positive a lot of people still see YouTubers as kind of like a subclass of influencers or they still just don't truly understand the the influence a lot of creators have in the last 90 days we've had 300 million unique people watch our videos that's a lot and on average for like 40 minutes each and that's just on YouTube I mean if you factor in Tick Tock and everything else it's probably closer to 400 450 million unique people our Revenue has gone up

every single year the last 10 years my investment is the content here and any money I take out is usually just a free up time so I can make more content not at the point yet but I kind of literally want to just sell everything I own mine is like a bed and like just put everything on the bed that I own and just live off of that I think so many people just are so materialistic and they just that's just what they chase and I really don't want that lifestyle when you die why does

it matter you know what I mean all this like materialistic stuff I really just want to focus on building the business and helping people because I feel like that's more what matters in life you know what I mean [Music] foreign [Music]