YouTuber MrBeast has vowed to give away the more than $260,000 he earned from the first video he posted to X after it racked up more than 150 million views in a week.
MrBeast, the world’s richest YouTuber, reuploaded his ‘$1 vs $100,000,000 car’ video to X on January 15 – four months after he had posted the same video to his YouTube channel and garnered 216 million views there.
Within a week MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, had attained more than 150 million views on X and earned $263,355 in revenue.
But some X users believe CEO Elon Musk, who had previously urged Mr Beast to upload his content to his social media platform rather than YouTube, rigged the success of the video.
MrBeast wrote: ‘My first video made over $250,000. But it’s a bit of a facade. Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is probably higher than what you’d experience.’
The YouTuber has since vowed to give away the huge pay out to his fans. MrBeast said he will give ten of his followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, $25,000 each.
MrBeast had originally uploaded his ‘$1 vs $100,000,000 car’ to YouTube where he racked up an eyewatering 216 million views.
But he decided to reupload it on January 15 to X – his first time uploading a video to the social media platform – because he was ‘curious’ about how much ad revenue a video on X would make.
The decision came after Musk had urged MrBeast to upload his videos to X in December.
MrBeast had told his followers on X in December that he had uploaded a video to his YouTube channel and they ‘must watch it, or I’ll drop kick you’.
One follower quickly responded, ‘Upload on this platform too’, before Musk himself wrote: ‘Yeah.’
Donaldson then explained why he wouldn’t be going along with that plan. ‘My videos cost millions to make, and even if they got a billion views on X, it wouldn’t fund a fraction of it,’ he wrote in response.
Although he added: ‘I’m down though to test stuff once monetization is really cranking!’
In June 2023, Musk made the same suggestion. He replied to one of Donaldson’s tweets saying: ‘Post to his platform too. Earnings per view should be competitive with YouTube. If not, we will adjust.’
Since acquiring X in 2022, Musk has made multiple attempts to have creators use his platform for original content.
Posts on X generate revenue only for those with verified accounts via the premium subscription option. Users generate money through engagement and advertising.
There is also an option that is similar to Twitch that allows people to pay to subscribe to their favorite creators in exchange for exclusive content.
It’s estimated that Donaldson makes between $2 million and $4 million per month from YouTube.
The 25-year-old from Wichita, Kansas, has amassed 232million subscribers on YouTube and more than 50 billion views since he started posting in 2012.
By 2018 he was donating $100,000 worth of products to a homeless shelter, and He has since repeated the dose to an Uber driver, a waitress, and people in parking lots.
In one video, he dropped $20,000 out of a drone and gave a pizza man the house he was delivering to as a tip.
A 14-time winner of the internet’s Streamy Awards he has branched out into smartphone apps, video game tournaments, restaurants, and his own food range earning an estimated $500million in the process.
In 2023, he claimed that he was one of those who was invited on the doomed Titan submersible journey.
‘I was invited earlier this month to ride the titanic submarine, I said no,’ he wrote on X. ‘Kind of scary that I could have been on it.’
Since acquiring X, Musk has touted the platform as a place for free speech to thrive, but changes that the billionaire Tesla CEO made to the site after he bought it a year ago — such as cutting the number of content moderators and restoring the banned accounts of divisive public personalities — have turned off users and advertisers, who have fled over concerns about hate speech appearing alongside their ads.
In December, Musk restored the account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to a poll on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.
Musk posted a poll asking if Jones should be reinstated, with the results showing 70% of those who responded in favor. Musk responded to the results saying: ‘The people have spoken and so it shall be.’
