MrBeast

MrBeast is the online handle of Jimmy Donaldson (born 1998), the most-subscribed individual creator in YouTube history and arguably the defining media entrepreneur of his generation. From his base in Greenville, North Carolina, he built an empire of high-budget stunt videos, the Feastables snack brand, the Amazon competition series Beast Games, and stunt-philanthropy channels that have planted trees, cleaned oceans, and cured blindness on camera.

Builder first, apologizer second

Donaldson’s instinct with AI has been to use it. He has been a vocal advocate of AI dubbing — telling Mark Zuckerberg in a March 2025 conversation that AI-cloned dubs of his own voice retained viewers better than human voice actors — and his channels lean heavily on translated audio tracks to reach a global audience. In June 2025 his analytics platform Viewstats went further, launching a generative-AI thumbnail tool that could mimic the style of any channel’s thumbnails for $80 a month.

The backlash was immediate. Thumbnail artists and fellow creators — including Jacksepticeye and PointCrow — attacked the tool for copying working artists’ styles and automating away their commissions. Within days Donaldson pulled it, conceding in a video that he “thought people were going to be pretty excited about it” but that the tool “fundamentally hurts creators as a whole.” He replaced it with a directory connecting creators to human thumbnail artists for commissions.

Four months later, as OpenAI’s Sora 2 flooded feeds with synthetic video, he posted the tweet that traveled furthest: when AI videos are as good as real ones, what happens to the millions who make content for a living? “Scary times.” It was a striking message from someone still using AI across his own operation — not a convert to the opposition, but the industry’s biggest winner admitting he cannot see where the technology leaves everyone else.