(Bloomberg) -- MrBeast is the biggest YouTube star in the world. But his real moneymaker isn’t creating viral videos — it’s selling chocolate.
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MrBeast’s company, Beast Industries, is majority owner of Feastables, a chocolate business that generated sales of about $250 million last year and a profit of more than $20 million, according to documents sent to potential investors. Over the same stretch, MrBeast’s media business, which includes his YouTube channel and his reality show for Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video, produced similar sales but lost almost $80 million.
MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has spent the past few years leveraging his fame on YouTube and other social platforms to build businesses that have nothing to do with media. In addition to Feastables, Beast Industries is a shareholder in the snack brand Lunchly and the owner of Viewstats, a software firm that sells digital tools to fellow content creators.
To fund those businesses, Beast Industries has raised more than $450 million over the past four years, according to people familiar with its past fundraising. The company is now looking to raise a couple hundred million dollars more, according to the documents, which provide performance data for the first three quarters of 2024 and estimates for the final three months of the year and into the future. The goal is to expand its existing divisions and move into several new areas, including video games, beverages and wellness.
The Verge previously reported on some of the documents.
Last year, Alpha Wave, an investment firm with ties to the United Arab Emirates, led a $300 million Series C round that valued Beast Industries at about $5 billion, up from roughly $1.5 billion a few months earlier, according to people familiar with the terms — a hefty valuation for a company that has lost money three years in a row, including almost $60 million in 2024. Speaking on the The Colin & Samir Show podcast in January, MrBeast noted that scaling a business “is very, very difficult.”
But Beast Industries has an unusual advantage — it’s built around one of the most famous celebrities in the world. The pitch to investors positions MrBeast as the second most-followed person on social media, trailing only soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. For certain investors, MrBeast’s star power is likely to make the business more appealing than the average startup. Among companies founded by a social-media creator or celebrity, Beast Industries already ranks as one of the most valuable, on par with Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty and Kim Kardashian’s Skims.
Donaldson started posting to YouTube when he was 11, filming himself playing video games Call of Duty and Minecraft. Years later, after spending countless hours studying what types of videos worked best on the platform, he eventually dropped out of college and made YouTube his full-time job.
Before long, MrBeast took off with young viewers by staging large-scale stunts and giveaways with enticing, often self-explanatory titles, such as ‘Ages 1-100 Fight for $500,000’ and ‘I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive.’ He now generates billions of views a year across several YouTube channels.
In his home state of North Carolina, MrBeast has built an operation with hundreds of employees, including 200 staffers who work on production. The extravagant videos don’t come cheap. Because each one typically features a unique challenge, MrBeast’s crew is constantly traveling to far-flung locations and erecting intricate new sets. The average video for MrBeast’s main channel now costs between $3 million and $4 million, according to people familiar with the company’s financials.
Recouping the lavish production budgets isn’t easy. There is only so much money a channel can make on YouTube, especially when only posting a couple of videos a month. To take his entertainment business to the next level, MrBeast approached major streaming services with an idea for a TV show. In the end, Amazon paid MrBeast about $100 million to produce the first season of Beast Games, one of the most expensive deals in the history of reality TV.
Even so, Beast Industries wound up losing money on the first season after spending in excess of $100 million. At one point during filming, MrBeast decided on the spot to double the prize money for contestants, adding to the overruns. “I lost tens of millions of dollars on Beast Games,” MrBeast later said on the Diary of a CEO podcast, noting that he just wanted to make the show as good as possible.
A few months before Beast Games debuted, rival YouTuber Rosanna Pansino posted a series of videos about the poor conditions on its set, which led to months of bad press — potentially dampening demand from potential commercial sponsors. In the end, the show’s primary sponsor was MoneyLion Technologies Inc., a financial technology company.
The show debuted in December, timed to compete with the second season of Netflix’s Squid Game. Amazon has since said that Beast Games it its most successful reality TV program ever, and it has agreed to make two more seasons. Budgets have yet to be agreed upon. “I hope I break even on seasons two and three, but I’m not good at breaking even,” MrBeast said on The Colin & Samir Show.
Last year, MrBeast hired venture capitalist Jeffrey Housenbold to serve as president and chief executive officer of Beast Industries. Housenbold has since filled out the executive team with a chief financial officer, a chief people officer and a general counsel while also building teams for brand partnerships and strategy. Ahead of a potential initial public offering, he’s now attempting to professionalize the business, clean up some of the spending waste and expand into new areas. According to the pitch to investors, the company may eventually branch out into cereal and snacks as well.
Housenbold says he will cut an estimated $100 million in costs this year while turning the company into a profitable business. The company is estimating a profit of about $300 million in 2026. He attributes the past losses to the kind of mistakes that startups often make early on when they are rapidly expanding. Among other savings, Housenbold believes the company can bring down its cost of production. Beast Industries is forecasting that it will spend less money on production in 2025 and 2026 than it did last year and that the media division will turn a profit as well.
Still, it’s clear that the entertainment wing of the company is increasingly a means of selling other products. “We have an unprecedented platform in terms of reach and fandom,” Housenbold said. “We have the opportunity to launch multiple business on the backs of that center of reach and distribution.”
Plenty of other major social-media stars are attempting a similar transition. Podcast host Alex Cooper has rolled out a drink line, Unwell. YouTube star turned podcast host Emma Chamberlain has built up a coffee business. And Logan Paul, an early YouTube performer, has co-founded Prime, an energy drink, and is partners with MrBeast on Lunchly.
Starting such brands may prove to be easier than sustaining them. MrBeast’s early foray into hamburgers resulted in a bruising legal battle with his partner in the business. But so far, such stumbles haven’t diminished MrBeast’s appetite for diversification. He started Feastables in 2021 with help from Jim Murray, the former president of the protein bar company RXbar. They introduced the chocolates by giving away prizes and inviting some of the winners to compete for a $500,000 cash purse in a MrBeast video.
At first, Beast Industries made some mistakes, including a packaging mishap. But customers weren’t deterred. More than 100 people now work on Feastables, and the chocolate bars, which were initially only available at Walmart, have since expanded to Europe, Africa and Asia.
Beast Industries forecasts that Feastables will triple in size over the next couple of years. Meanwhile, the company is projecting that by 2026, media revenue will only account for one-fifth of its total sales.
Content and media are “a marketing investment in everything else we do,” Housenbold said.
(Updates with additional categories for potential expansion in 15th paragraph. Previous versions corrected the name of a company position and the executive’s title in the 15th paragraph.)
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