
MrBeast: If You Want To Be Liked, Don't Help People & I Lost Tens Of Millions On Beast Games!
MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) (guest), Steven Bartlett (host), Narrator
In this episode of The Diary of a CEO, featuring MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) and Steven Bartlett, MrBeast: If You Want To Be Liked, Don't Help People & I Lost Tens Of Millions On Beast Games! explores mrBeast Explains Obsession, Sacrifice, and Losing Millions To Help Others Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) unpacks the extreme obsession, sacrifice, and unconventional thinking behind building the world’s biggest YouTube channel and a fast-growing ethical chocolate company, Feastables. He describes a childhood marked by illness, bankruptcy, and social isolation that forged his stubborn commitment to YouTube and taking care of his mom. Jimmy details how he deliberately trades mental health, comfort, and financial upside for bigger, riskier projects like Beast Games, on which he personally lost tens of millions. He also explains his mission to eliminate child labor from cocoa supply chains, why public philanthropy attracts disproportionate hate, and how his workaholism collides with relationships, happiness, and long‑term life plans.
MrBeast Explains Obsession, Sacrifice, and Losing Millions To Help Others
Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) unpacks the extreme obsession, sacrifice, and unconventional thinking behind building the world’s biggest YouTube channel and a fast-growing ethical chocolate company, Feastables. He describes a childhood marked by illness, bankruptcy, and social isolation that forged his stubborn commitment to YouTube and taking care of his mom. Jimmy details how he deliberately trades mental health, comfort, and financial upside for bigger, riskier projects like Beast Games, on which he personally lost tens of millions. He also explains his mission to eliminate child labor from cocoa supply chains, why public philanthropy attracts disproportionate hate, and how his workaholism collides with relationships, happiness, and long‑term life plans.
Key Takeaways
Extreme, sustained obsession is MrBeast’s core competitive advantage—and he deliberately leans into it.
Jimmy frames his “superpower” as the ability to think about one problem for 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for years. ...
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He consciously sacrifices comfort and mental health to build an unbeatable moat of effort.
Jimmy says plainly that if mental health were his priority, he “wouldn’t be as successful. ...
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Feastables is designed as both a business and a proof‑of‑concept for ethical supply chains.
After learning that ~46% of labor on West African cocoa farms is child labor and that about 1. ...
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Helping people publicly often attracts more hate than flaunting luxury—and he’s accepted that trade‑off.
Jimmy notes that when he buys or compares expensive items, the internet cheers, but when he funds cataract surgeries, builds wells, or provides clean water, waves of criticism accuse him of exploitation or ulterior motives. ...
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He lost tens of millions on Beast Games to open doors for creators and set a new bar for unscripted TV.
Despite headlines about Amazon’s funding, Jimmy says Beast Games cost over $100M and he personally lost “tens of millions” making season one, between record‑breaking sets and over $20M in prizes. ...
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His leadership model is extreme standards plus extreme investment in long‑term A‑players.
Jimmy insists his top people share his obsession and see working with him as a decade‑long career, not a job. ...
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He operationalizes experimentation and post‑mortems to keep innovating while scaling.
Jimmy is comfortable with 10‑out‑of‑10 (worst performing) uploads if they were genuine experiments executed with full effort. ...
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Notable Quotes
“If my mental health was a priority, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am. This is the price you have to pay.”
— MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson)
“There’s a reason no one makes videos like me, because no one wants to live the life I live or be in my head.”
— MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson)
“If you’re trying to be liked, I actually don’t recommend you help people.”
— MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson)
“I don’t want to get rich on the back of little kids.”
— MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson)
“Money is fuel to grow a business… When is enough enough? Never. Building a business is like a video game.”
— MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson)
Questions Answered in This Episode
You’ve said that if mental health were your priority, you wouldn’t be as successful. Looking ahead 10–20 years, is there a version of success where you intentionally dial the obsession down, and what concrete trade‑offs would that require?
Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) unpacks the extreme obsession, sacrifice, and unconventional thinking behind building the world’s biggest YouTube channel and a fast-growing ethical chocolate company, Feastables. ...
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With Feastables, you’re trying to prove that ethical sourcing can work at a billion‑dollar scale. If the big chocolate companies still refuse to change once you’ve proven the model, what is your next escalation step to force or incentivize industry‑wide reform?
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You framed helping people publicly as actually making you less liked online. If a young creator feels called to do visible philanthropy, what safeguards or strategies would you recommend so they don’t get psychologically crushed by the backlash you’ve experienced?
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You often treat suffering—extreme travel, illness, insane schedules—as your moat. How do you distinguish between productive suffering that builds an edge and destructive suffering that just shortens your career or life without adding value?
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Given that your presence on camera is currently the bottleneck for everything—from Beast Games to Feastables growth—have you considered any structural changes (avatars, multiple hosts, decentralised channels) that could decouple your impact from your limited time in front of the lens?
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Transcript Preview
There's a reason no one makes videos like me, because no one wants to live the life I live or be in my head. They would, they would be miserable.
Are you happy?
Um, ah, f- I, I'm gonna be honest, so far, more unhappy than happy.
Well, has it ever crossed your mind to quit YouTube as a whole?
Oh, yeah, of course.
Really?
Yeah.
Are you?
Oh, boy. (sighs)
MrBeast.
MrBeast.
MrBeast. He is the biggest YouTuber on the planet.
And he's building empires. I mean, is there anything this man can't do? Your business empire is much bigger than most people realize.
Yeah, I mean, I'm only 26 and we have the largest YouTube channel in the world. And Beast Games is gonna shatter some pretty crazy records and we do nine figures in Feastables. But a lot of that stems from being a very confused child that's not fitting in that feels like a (censored) freak. Plus I really wanted to take care of my mom because when I was 11, we literally went bankrupt and lost everything. Luckily it worked out and it's because I'm really good at obsessing over one thing more than anyone else on the planet. Like, I lost tens of millions of dollars on Beast Games. But it's about making season one as good as possible, and I just really love solving complex problems. Like, how many kids do you think are in child labor in West Africa, just on cocoa farms? It's 1.5 million. And so with Feastables, we're trying to get over a million kids out of child labor. But the ironic part is the more I help people, the more (censored) I get. Like, I've read over 5,000 messages telling me to kill myself. I mean, there's definitely times where I would cry, but if my mental health was a priority, I wouldn't be as successful as I am. This is the price you have to pay.
But when is enough enough?
Honestly ...
This has always blown my mind a little bit, 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like this show and you like what we do here and you wanna support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is, if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Jimmy, we've really just only met, and you are already, to me, a bit of a Rubik's cube-
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