In the back, there are 1 billion Orbeez, tiny gel-filled pellets that Donaldson used to fill his best friend’s back garden for a video back in 2018.

Then, we come to the money. “If you wanted to rob us, here’s where you’d rob us,” Donaldson says. The cash is guarded by an affable man named Tracy Parisher; he is an operations manager at MrBeast YouTube LLC, and the stepfather of its founder.

Piles of cash lie in a steel-plated space in filing cabinets, stacked in rows, all in ones. Usually, it’s a full million, but today there’s US$100,000 missing, for an upcoming trip to Florida, where Donaldson and his crew will shoot a “Would You Rather” video – as in, would you rather swim with sharks for that money or walk a bridge of alligators.

Some of the bills are crumpled on the floor at Donaldson’s trainers. “It takes up more space and looks better on camera [that way],” he explains.

A funny thing happens when you see a lot of money in one place. As the smell hits my nostrils, crisp and pungent, like a pile of autumn leaves, I start to think about the ways it could change my life, or the lives of those around me – the medical bills that need to be paid, school tuition, childcare; all of the GoFundMe’s and charities it could help.

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I feel almost light-headed, as if I’ve taken a right hook square in the jaw (a recent Beast stunt that came with a US$20,000 prize). The effect does not go unnoticed by Parisher and Donaldson. “Most of the people around here, they’re immune to it,” says Parisher.

“Yeah, we’re numb,” Donaldson says.

“They’ll sit here and count it for me and won’t even blink an eye nowadays,” Parisher says.

“Do you ever just think about how many people’s lives this amount of money could change,” I ask.

Donaldson looks at me like I’ve just asked what colour the sky is. “Yeah, exactly,” he says. “That’s why we have it.”

On his YouTube channel, MrBeast, Donaldson is the main character, luring his 95 million subscribers to lavish, high-production-value videos that cost US$10,000 each to produce paired with titles optimised for YouTube’s algorithm, such as Extreme US$1,000,000 Hide-and-Seek and World’s Most Dangerous Escape Room!

Many of the stunts verge on clickbait. In I Ate the World’s Largest Slice of Pizza, Donaldson attempts to consume a nine-pound (4kg), six-foot-long slice. In Spending 24 Hours Straight Underwater, he survives being submerged for 12-plus hours in a pool, his head inside a chamber rigged with an oxygen pump.

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Others are do-gooder content in the vein of the 1950s game show Queen for a Day, giving homeless people houses or donating US$100,000 to random streamers on Twitch.

In late 2020, Donaldson started the Beast Philanthropy channel, which contributes 100 per cent of its revenue to a warehouse that operates mobile food donations throughout eastern North Carolina and reportedly delivered 1,000,563 meals by the end of 2021.

Donaldson also offers his subscribers a chance to get in on a windfall through sweepstakes and competitions. Alex Maloney, a 20-year-old from Canada, won US$100,000 by holding his finger on a MrBeast app button for more than two days straight.

Maloney, who is unemployed and mulling whether to go to college, says having that money in the bank has given him a sense of security. “It was monumental. It made me feel more stable,” he says, adding that Donaldson “changes lives unbelievably”.

In these videos, Donaldson is often flanked by an ensemble of gawky, early-20-something white guys, many of whom live in the same cul-de-sac as Donaldson and have carved out extensive YouTube followings of their own.

They include Chris Tyson, a frequent presence in Donaldson’s earliest videos; Chandler Hallow, who grew up playing baseball with Donaldson; and Karl Jacobs, an upstate New York native who started out as an editor and graduated to a fixture in the group Donaldson refers to as “the boys”.

With the boys in tow, Donaldson has built a multi­media empire, raking in a reported US$54 million in revenue on his main channel last year. He also has a ghost-kitchen chain, MrBeast Burger, a delivery-only restaurant with 1,600 franchises throughout the country.

In January, he launched Feastables, a line of chocolate bars, with a Willy Wonka-esque “Win MrBeast’s Chocolate Factory” promo, and he earns an estimated half a million dollars per month in merch.

Over the course of less than a decade, Donaldson has gone from making gaming-commentary videos in his bedroom to managing 60 full-time employees, not counting independent contractors.

He is also, it should be noted, 24 years old. “Five years ago, I had to raise my hand to go use the bathroom,” he tells me. “This is the tip of the iceberg. Give me 20 years and then see what we will accomplish.”

Donaldson’s company is in the process of building three content and production hubs in his hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, a city dotted by strip malls, office parks and the campus of East Carolina University. Donaldson hopes to position Greenville as a magnet for content creators in digital media.

“The biggest parallel I could draw is to Tyler Perry in Atlanta,” says MrBeast LLC president Marc Hustvedt, who splits his time between Greenville and Los Angeles. “Jimmy’s creating his own studio system here.”

In some respects, Donaldson is an unlikely frontman for a multimillion-dollar empire. A self-described introvert, he often reiterates his discomfort with casual conversation. In our first interaction, he ambled up to me in the driveway of his 60,000 sq ft (5,570 sq m) studio and said, by way of introduction, “So, we’re going to start talking now?”

Even those who know Donaldson well are surprised he’s opted for a life in front of the camera.

“If you ask anybody that knew Jimmy before, they’d be like, ‘Really? Jimmy got famous?’” says Tyson, his long-time best friend.

“He was always really quiet. But it wasn’t like he didn’t want to talk to people. Jimmy just likes to talk about what he likes to talk about” – mostly, gaming or YouTube – “and if no one’s talking about that, he doesn’t like to talk.”

But in truth, the main character of MrBeast’s channel is not actually MrBeast himself. It is cold, hard cash. Money – piles, sheaves, gobs of it – takes centre stage in nearly all of his videos, proffered as a balm for all of the world’s problems to those who star in his videos.

In one, he tips a waitress US$10,000 for two glasses of water; in another, he gives more than US$100,000 to people who lost their jobs in the pandemic.

Much of the appeal of MrBeast is predicated on an updated version of the Horatio Alger story; the idea that with a little bit of luck you, too, could one day run into MrBeast on the street and walk away thousands of dollars richer.

Of course, this type of giving is something of a Band-Aid on a brain tumour. It may get attention, but it ignores structural inequities and cyclical poverty.

Over lunch with Donaldson and two of the boys – Jacobs and Tareq Salameh, a former aspiring comic turned cameraman who’s been promoted to the cast – I comment that their videos seem to ride on the idea that a fat cheque or a wad of cash can cure all manner of ills.

“It kinda can,” says Salameh.

Donaldson nods: “If you have a trillion dollars, you don’t really have any problems.”

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Donaldson models himself after his heroes, the entrepreneurs Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, portraits of whom adorn Donaldson’s office and the living room of his house (including one of Musk, procured on Amazon, dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte).

“But I think it’s inspiring that he’s weaning the world off of oil and rebuilding imagination when it comes to space exploration and stuff like that.”

Donaldson claims not to have any vivid memories of his childhood before the age of 11. He chalks this up in part to his entrepreneurial streak. “I’m very forward-thinking,” he says. “F*** the past. It’s already happened. I’m trying to conquer the future.”

Indeed, he seems to have been born without any semblance of a nostalgia gene: though his mother has a giant warehouse where she preserves every single memento from his old videos, he’s never gone to see it.

That lack of nostalgia may also serve as a protective measure, because Donaldson’s upbringing appears to have been less than stable. He was born in Kansas, the middle child to parents who were on active duty in the military, with his mother, Sue, serving as a prison warden in Mannheim, Germany, before being stationed at Fort Leavenworth.

“Jimmy thinks it’s pretty badass that his mum ran a prison,” says Sue, a soft-spoken woman. She now works as MrBeast LLC’s chief compliance officer, overseeing the company’s expenditures and contracts while managing her son’s personal affairs, such as his banking. (She even picked out the house where he lives.)

Sue worked 12-hour days while she was on active duty, and much of the childcare was outsourced to au pairs. She attributes Jimmy’s introversion largely to the fact that they moved so frequently.

“We lived in three different locations in the southern US before he was seven,” she says. “There were no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. It was really just us.”

His parents split up in 2007, when Donaldson was eight, and he no longer has any contact with his father. He declined to discuss the reasons on the record. “I just tried my hardest to keep everything moving forward as best as possible,” Sue says of the divorce. “We got through it the best that we could get through it.”

Donaldson attended a small private school, Greenville Christian Academy, where boys were given demerits for wearing their hair too long and forced to copy Bible verses as punishment. He says he used to be observant – “You have it beat into your head every day” – but long questioned the Church’s stance on issues such as homosexuality, and has since pivoted to identifying as agnostic.

“It’s such a sensitive topic for so many people around here,” he says. “I believe there is a God, but there are so many different religions and so many people who believe passionately about these things. It’s hard to know which [religion] is right.”

Growing up, Donaldson had few friends, rarely going out with other children on the weekends. Sue identified a deeply competitive streak in him early on. “You couldn’t throw a game with him. You always had to play it all the way through,” she says.

“Like with Monopoly. We wanted to throw it out after a while, because he was like, ‘Don’t even pretend to give me Boardwalk and Park.’”

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“There’s a five-year point in my life where I was just relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm,” he says. “I woke up. I would Uber Eats food. And then I would sit on my computer all day just studying s*** non-stop with [other YouTubers].”

Donaldson admits that his focus on his work has made it difficult for him to maintain personal relationships. “I’m not really good at keeping friends,” he says. “All my friends revolve around work.”

He also spends little time with his family, including the older brother who lives nearby, another YouTuber Donaldson describes as being somewhat like him but “less successful”. (It doesn’t help that his brother’s channel is called “MrBro”, a decision Donaldson says his brother now regrets.)

The stress of having to deal with his Crohn’s, Sue says, led Donaldson to spend more time indoors, prompting his pivot to YouTube.

In truth, Donaldson had already established a presence on the platform, uploading videos of himself playing Minecraft and Call of Duty when he was 11. When he was 13, he started a new channel, adopting the handle “MrBeast6000” because “Mr. Beast” was already taken.

At first, it appears that Donaldson was trying to find his voice, capitalising on various YouTube trends to see what stuck: he tried video-game commentary, à la PewDiePie, then made videos estimating how much various YouTubers made.

Slowly, however, he started to rack up subscribers and eke out revenue, in part by engaging in increasingly extreme stunts. In one video, Tyson wraps him in 100 layers of toilet paper and cling film; in another, Donaldson counts to 100,000, an idea he says he got from seeing if he could try to monetise watching multiple episodes of the anime Naruto in one sitting. In a video he published in 2015 addressed to a future him, he says, “I hope you have at least 100k subs.” In May 2017, he would hit a million subscribers.

Sue had no idea he was making YouTube videos, and was stunned when she found out through an entry in his yearbook. “I was a normal parent,” she says. “I was very concerned at what was out there.”

When Donaldson made it clear that he was making money off his channel, however, her anxiety was reduced. Still, she was insistent that Jimmy go to college and get a degree. Donaldson acquiesced, enrolling in community college, though he says he did not attend a single class and dropped out midway through the first semester.

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With that, Sue kicked her son out of the house, prompting him to move in with Tyson. It was perfect timing: Donaldson had just reached 750,000 subscribers and got his first brand deal. Rather than spend it, he reinvested the cash into a video where he gave a homeless person a US$10,000 cheque.

It was not Donaldson’s first video in which he gave away cash for free, but he saw that this brand of stunt philanthropy resonated. He shifted to giveaway-centric videos, such as Tipping Waitresses With Real Gold Bars (53 million views), and soon, he was earning US$100,000 a month from his channel.

“One day he came in with a cheque and was like, ‘Mum, look how much I just made,’” says Sue. “And it was my entire year’s salary.” She retired and joined the company soon thereafter.

Donaldson says he doesn’t “give a f*** about money”, and plans to give it all away before he dies. “I don’t want to live my life chasing from the next shiny object to the next shiny object,” he says as we drive around in his Tesla Model X. “It’s a sad, miserable way to go about life.”

His assistant, a Utah transplant named Steele, says that before his hiring, and Donaldson’s ex-girlfriend redesigning his kitchen, YouTube’s biggest star had lawn chairs in his living room and mattresses on the floor.

“I don’t give a s*** about looks,” Donaldson says. “I just care about functionality.” Yet he also seems to be fixated on how much some shiny objects cost, pointing out that his custom-built, double-sided refrigerator cost US$50,000 to install.

His reputation for being cash-rich also comes with security concerns. His apartment was broken into three or four years ago while he was filming, prompting him to move to a gated community and into a house with bulletproof windows and triple-steel-reinforced doors.

A bodyguard accompanies him whenever he ventures out in public in Greenville. These concerns do not seem unfounded: during our lunch, two teenagers wait outside in the car park for hours, and tail Donaldson’s car when we leave.

Donaldson acknowledges this is a problem of his own making. “I can create whatever world I want, do whatever I want for content, and I choose this,” he says. “[In] the end, I have tonnes of influence. If I wanted to, I could have tons of money. Boohoo, people have expectations of me. I’ll live.”

Fundamentally, Donaldson seems to view money as a means to an end, a tool for him to accomplish his goal of dominating YouTube. “It doesn’t matter to me,” he says of the gold bars and Lamborghinis and stacks of cash in his warehouse. “But it matters to other people. And that’s what allows us to get views so I can make more money and do bigger stuff.”

As Donaldson’s subscriber count has ballooned, so, too, has the amount of money he spends on his videos. Today, many cost around a million dollars each to produce, few of which are profitable.

The main channel is largely subsidised by Donaldson’s “gaming” and “reacts” channels, which feature the boys and are cost-efficient to produce, pulling in a great deal of revenue. “I could be doing cheaper videos,” Donaldson says. “But I just don’t want to. I want to push the boundaries to go bigger, bigger.”

But the Squid Game remake also garnered criticism from many who said it missed the point of the original series, which showed the brutal toll that free enterprise takes on middle-class people’s lives. Donaldson dismisses the criticism.

It was not the first time Donaldson had encountered controversy. In 2018, The Atlantic reported that he had used anti-gay slurs in tweets he posted when he was a teenager, and had used homosexuality as a punchline in a number of his videos.

At the time, he did not issue an apology, instead telling the magazine, “I’m not offensive in the slightest bit in anything I do. I’m just going to ignore it. I don’t think anyone cares about this stuff.” Today, he is more contrite.

“As I grew up, I realised, ‘Oh, this isn’t normal. This is just a weird place I grew up in.’ So, that type of thing, I [wish I could] go back in time and be like, ‘Hey, stop’.”

Some in Donaldson’s posse have also faced scrutiny for their language on social media, including Tyson, who was called out in April 2021 for having posted transphobic and homophobic memes on Twitter.

Tyson deleted the tweets and issued an apology, telling me he considered the experience “an opportunity for learning and growth” and that the tweets stemmed from his own struggles with his sexuality; he came out as bisexual in the autumn of 2020.

Donaldson is less reflective about a video he posted in 2016 that resurfaced last year, in which he appears to lampoon the concept of transgenderism by saying he sexually identifies as an attack helicopter and a tank, playing off of a meme that originated on Reddit and 4chan.

He states in the now-deleted clip, “Is someone just sitting there and getting paid to think of genders?” Though the meme was a fairly well-known trans­phobic joke at the time, Donaldson denies being familiar with its origins. “I was just playing along with the meme like everyone else,” he says, referring to the video as “a joke”.

Donaldson has managed to deflect criticism in part because he aims to be staunchly apolitical, at least publicly. “I don’t want to alienate Republicans and Democrats,” he says.

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Perhaps the greatest threat to MrBeast’s brand was a 2021 investigation by The New York Times that quoted former employees alleging that Donaldson had fostered a toxic work environment, screaming at workers, forcing them to work long hours and calling them slurs. Two of the former MrBeast editors who spoke out, Nate Anderson and Matt Turner, deleted videos they had posted about their experiences because of the harassment they got from MrBeast fans.

Donaldson denies the claims. “I’ve literally worked with over a thousand people. Two people thought I was pretty demanding, which was perfectly fine,” he says. “We have high standards, but it’s not a toxic work environment.”

He has said he gave Turner US$10,000 and recommended him for a gig at a company following the termination of his contract. (Turner, for his part, says the actual amount was smaller than that.)

Tyson frames the conflicts as a function of Donaldson’s difficulties communicating. “He knows what he wants, and I think he also has a very hard time socialising,” he says. “We’ve talked about this – I think he has a hard time explaining to people what he wants and what he needs.”

But for Turner, those negative encounters made a lasting impression: “You see him on camera and you’re like, ‘He’s such a cool dude.’ Knowing him, you’d be like, ‘Damn, I wish the cool Jimmy was the real Jimmy’.”

Donaldson’s brand as a budding philanthropist certainly helps render him Teflon. Over the past few years, he has pivoted away from attention-grabbing stunts on YouTube to more philanthropically minded videos.

In addition to setting up Beast Philanthropy, where CEO Darren Margolias helms weekly food drives as well as clothing drives sourced from YouTuber merch, Donaldson went viral for launching #TeamTrees in partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation, and #TeamSeas.

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“Planting 20 million trees is not going to solve the climate crisis,” he acknowledges. “Having said that, drawing attention to the need for planting trees, and the benefits, is hugely valuable.” Lambe confirms #TeamTrees has planted 14 million trees thus far, and is on track to hit its goal by the end of the year.

Donaldson did not grow up with much exposure to philanthropy. Sue says he never participated in volunteer activities or church community service, and he does not claim to have an emotional attachment to any of the causes he champions. Yet Margolias says Donaldson’s earliest experiences giving money to homeless people “ignited a fire” in him, leading him to want to harness his power and influence to change the world.

By championing philanthropic causes, Margolias says, Donaldson wants to school an entirely new generation (YouTube analytics doesn’t track viewers below the age of 12, but his audience skews quite young, Donaldson says) in the benefits of unconditional giving.

“So many people are conditioned to think giving money to charity is a burden or a sacrifice,” says Margolias, an earnest, stocky gentleman in his early 50s. “But when people realise helping is enjoyable and beautiful, that will change the way they think about giving.”

Margolias says that much of Donaldson’s largesse occurs off camera, citing multiple examples where he spent tens of thousands of dollars on Christmas presents for children who had lost family members in a hurricane, or renting a home and furnishing it for a family of nine whose parents had lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

“Jimmy said to me the first night I met him, his life ambition is to improve the world. I have no shadow of a doubt that’s sincere,” he says. “Also to the people that say ‘He does it for the views,’ we have done some stunningly generous things Jimmy pays for 100 per cent out of pocket that nobody knows about.”

Donaldson is sensitive to any questions about his motivations. “I know myself, and I don’t have anything to prove to anyone. I think what I’ve done speaks for itself,” he says.

“I have an entire channel built around my non-profit that I’ve invested ungodly amounts of hours into building, that I’ll never see a single penny out of […] I lose five figures and dozens of hours every month. The opportunity cost could go to projects that make millions of dollars. So I don’t care. I don’t say this stuff publicly, because that’s not why I do it.”

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Donaldson says he hears from countless parents who tell him their children wanted to pick up rubbish at a beach or volunteer at a soup kitchen because of his videos. And many parents of MrBeast fans I spoke with said their children had pushed them to donate to #TeamSeas or #TeamTrees. Though when I suggest MrBeast videos may present a cynical concept of charity, it touches a nerve.

“Your concern literally isn’t even a concern whatsoever,” Donaldson says. “There’s not millions of kids now doing good and filming it. There’s just millions of kids who are doing good.”

Like many entrepreneurs, Donaldson does not have much by way of a personal life; or at least, he does not have any interest in portraying that he has one. He recently split from lifestyle influencer Maddy Spidell, who has appeared in a handful of his videos, and those in his circle told me that Spidell had been a positive influence, forcing Donaldson to prioritise work-life balance more.

Donaldson did not want to comment on the record about the break-up, citing Spidell’s privacy, yet Tyson says Donaldson’s singular focus on work was a major contributing factor. “I think that’s what he’s going to be looking for next: somebody who can match his obsession with business and money and all that kind of stuff,” he says.

Donaldson, however, is less interested in dating than he is in growing his brand: reaching 100 million subscribers, opening more MrBeast Burgers, becoming the most successful YouTuber of all time.

Unlike many other creators, who crave acceptance from the mainstream entertainment establishment, he doesn’t have any interest in obtaining Netflix deals or recording contracts; his concern is building his influence on the platform that made him famous.

“I want to be the biggest YouTube channel ever,” he says. “Not even for my ego. I don’t know. I just want it. It just gives me something to strive for, to get out of bed and grind for. But it’s also just vanity.”

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Surprisingly, for someone who is singularly obsessed with YouTube, Donaldson says he doesn’t often watch YouTube videos any more. Instead, he’s become deeply consumed by the field of self-optimisation.

He installed a gym in the middle of his kitchen as a motivational tool, so he can work out instead of grabbing a snack. He regularly reads biographies of highly successful men, most recently finishing one about former professional basketball player Michael Jordan. He has also hired a life coach, who told him that successful men peak at 40.

“At first I was like, ‘You’re f***ing crazy,’” he says. “But I think I do believe it. [So] as long as you’re staying physically fit, you’re not wrinkly. And if you have money and stuff like that.”

If his life coach is right, Donaldson has more than a decade left until he hits his peak, and he will tolerate no distractions. He says that when renovations to the MrBeast LLC studio are complete, he will have a shower installed in his office so he can keep working without having to go home.

“I need to just obsess, grind, and keep going,” he says. “If you’re on an exponential growth curve, you don’t want to let it flatline.”

It’s the kind of attitude that’s led him to have the fifth most popular YouTube channel in the world. But, of course, he wants to be first.

That’s what the new, bigger studio, the crazy sets, the ever-more-elaborate stunts, the live sharks, the lime-green Lambos, the million dollar bills, and tens of millions more in the bank are all for, even if none of it feels like quite enough.

“This is all I do, really,” he says as we sit in the front seat of his Tesla. “I don’t party. I barely have friends. And there is a risk: I look back when I’m 50 and I’m like, ‘Damn, I literally only did that one thing and nothing else.’”