Author: Zen, PANews
"I want to do something bigger." On February 9, Beast Industries announced the acquisition of the youth and Gen Z finance app Step—a product focusing on "credit building, savings tools, debit cards."
If you only understand it as "an influencer adding another side business," you underestimate the scale of this action. Because before this news, the market had already seen clearer preparations.
In January 2026, the publicly traded company Bitmine announced a $200 million investment in Beast Industries, and its chairman Tom Lee directly linked MrBeast's future with "digital financial platforms" in public statements. As early as October 2025, Beast had submitted a trademark application for "MRBEAST FINANCIAL," marking a significant territory in one go.
All of this is happening against a more contrasting backdrop. As of February 2026, MrBeast's main channel subscriptions had reached approximately 467 million, making him the most dominant content machine globally; but at the same time, Beast Industries' media business has been reported to be in a "high revenue, even higher costs" structural dilemma.
The world's top YouTuber is losing more money as he creates more
MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is the most successful and creative video creator on YouTube, without question. Now, at 27, with 467 million followers, MrBeast has been creating content for 14 years.
In early 2012, at just 13 years old, MrBeast launched the YouTube channel "MrBeast6000," thus starting his video creation career. In the early days, MrBeast tried all the trending content recommended by algorithms, from gameplay of games like "Minecraft" to estimating the wealth of other YouTubers. However, these videos did not attract attention, and their view counts barely reached a thousand. But this did not stop him from creating, as MrBeast believed that if he worked harder, he would eventually stand out.
MrBeast's first successful "breakthrough" happened in January 2017 when he uploaded a video of himself counting to 100,000, which quickly went viral online, garnering tens of thousands of views within days. Seeing that this model was effective, MrBeast found his initial traffic formula—extreme challenges, emotional stimuli, and shareable gimmicks. He later counted to 200,000, spun a fingertip top for 24 hours straight, and watched a music video for 10 hours continuously. He dropped out of college and devoted himself fully to operating on YouTube.
As a full-time creator, MrBeast began to be bolder and more attention-grabbing in his creativity, donating $10,000 to a live streamer with zero viewers, pouring a hundred million "water balls" into a pool, staying overnight in a psychiatric hospital, soaking for a day in slime, etc., leading to a continuous surge in fan numbers. To fund these video ideas, MrBeast not only relied on advertising revenue and merchandise sales but also tirelessly signed agreements with many companies for brand collaborations worth tens of thousands of dollars. These companies, based on his massive fan base and high view counts, were also happy to pay high fees for this.
In March 2019, MrBeast gathered over thirty top YouTube influencers with a total of 200 million subscribers to host a real-life battle royale. The developer of the "battle royale" game "Apex Legends," Electronic Arts, provided $200,000 in prize money for the event. This video quickly became a hit, surpassing 15 million views in a short time. From then on, MrBeast began to implement a variety show production concept, thus setting foot on the path to the YouTuber throne.
The real-life 456,000-dollar squid game became the super hit video that formally established MrBeast as a phenomenon creator and was one of the most important nodes in his career. This video became one of the most-watched on YouTube in 2021, reaching over 130 million views within a week. That same year, MrBeast also hosted the third Influencer Championship, with 15 participants and a prize pool of up to $1 million. In January 2022, Forbes magazine ranked MrBeast as the highest-earning creator on YouTube, estimating his earnings for 2021 to be $54 million.
However, due to the high-budget, variety-style production model, MrBeast continued to invest in increasingly extravagant challenges, sets, filming, and post-production, which skyrocketed his cost curve alongside scale. Even if a video could bring in millions of dollars from advertising revenue and brand collaborations, he nearly reinvested all of that income into the next round of filming, forming a cycle of higher budgets, larger scales, and stronger dissemination. MrBeast stated that he "reinvests everything to an almost foolish degree."
According to Business Insider, in 2024, his media business revenue was about $224 million, but costs reached about $344 million, showing a clear loss structure in the content segment.
Therefore, for MrBeast, who rose to fame through video creation, the content business is closer to a customer acquisition and brand advertising positioning, focusing attention and trust on the MrBeast IP. What is truly easier to profit from are replicable, scalable consumer goods and retail lines.
Chocolate bars become the pillar of a business empire
The first large-scale experiment of monetizing content traffic and personal IP for MrBeast was the launch of "MrBeast Burger" in 2020. Unlike traditional fast food chains, MrBeast Burger uses a "ghost kitchen" model that emerged during the pandemic: the brand does not build its own stores but partners with third-party operators to package the menu, marketing, and delivery channels for convenience stores and small eateries.
The advantage of this model is rapid expansion; it does not slowly scale up like traditional dining relies on opening stores, site selection, and decoration, but can utilize MrBeast's strength in content distribution to reach consumers in a very short time. In the first three months after its launch, MrBeast Burger sold over a million burgers. In the following two years, the brand continued to expand rapidly, signing up approximately 1,700 "franchisees" by 2022. In September 2022, MrBeast opened his first physical store in New Jersey, drawing about 10,000 fans on the opening day.
However, the ghost kitchen model also has fatal flaws. Since delivery is completed by partner kitchens, it is challenging for MrBeast Burger to achieve consistent quality control and service standards. Thus, problems like undercooked burgers or soggy fries are hard to resolve, and many consumers have commented that its products are inedible, along with continuous issues of incorrect orders and chaotic packaging, which caused irreversible damage to the MrBeast brand.
Faced with the difficulties, MrBeast decided to abandon the burger business and sued the partner Virtual Dining Concepts, which retaliated and filed a counter-suit, pushing the dispute into long-term litigation.
Unlike MrBeast Burger, MrBeast's second main focus, the chocolate brand "Feastables," adopts a traditional consumer goods approach. It aims to create standardized products, utilize retail channels, and consolidate brand power into a repeatable shelf business. Feastables officially launched in January 2022, with its first product being the MrBeast Bar chocolate bar, using gamified interactions and reward mechanisms to transfer the interactive advantages of its online content to offline consumer goods.
On October 2, 2023, Feastables partnered with the Charlotte Hornets to become the official sponsor of their NBA jerseys for the 2023-24 season, further expanding its brand influence. Currently, the Feastables brand is a cash flow pillar and growth engine in MrBeast's business layout, with projected sales of approximately $250 million and profits of about $20 million in 2024; by 2025, Feastables' sales are expected to reach about $520 million.
In addition, MrBeast co-founded a snack set brand, Lunchly, with several other influencers, targeting the well-known lunchbox brand Lunchables. However, the products launched by Lunchly are very similar to existing Lunchables products, with relatively low nutritional components, and there have been complaints about mold in the packaging. All Lunchly products contain a Feastables chocolate bar, and some media have pointed out that this product is intended to boost Feastables' sales.
Lunchly has attracted much criticism from outside. YouTube gaming influencer DanTDM described Lunchly as "selling junk to clueless kids, who don't trust the people pushing the junk at all." The youth movement organization Bite Back claimed it was particularly concerning for a social media star to promote high sugar, high fat foods, while the chair of the food and nutrition committee at the children’s charity also described the product launch as "junk food marketing."
Key assistant Jeff Housenbold joins
In early 2024, during a fundraising period, MrBeast was introduced to Jeff Housenbold by Chamath Palihapitiya, the venture capitalist leading his first funding round, and Housenbold subsequently joined to drive professional operations within the company.
Housenbold is indeed the most suitable assistant to help MrBeast manage his business empire. Housenbold was previously the CEO of e-commerce company Shutterfly, where he successfully led the company to an IPO in 2006, turning it into the fifth largest independent e-commerce company in the U.S. Additionally, Housenbold was a managing partner at SoftBank's investment advisory firm, helping manage and lead the company's $100 billion Vision Fund. Some of the companies he invested in include DoorDash, Rappi, Compass, and Katerra.
In response to Beast Industries' media business situation of "high revenue but even higher costs," Housenbold introduced stricter budgeting processes after taking office and set up a dedicated team to evaluate budget feasibility before filming, aiming to enhance spending discipline while ensuring program quality.
In the past, MrBeast often bought expensive giveaways like Teslas at retail prices; under Housenbold's leadership, the company has shifted more towards obtaining free or discounted products through brand collaborations and has established a dedicated brand partnership team to handle this. Housenbold's goal is to "ensure that everything the company does can be profitable" and to promote renegotiating advertising contracts, increasing prices, and using tools/AI to reduce costs.
Acquisition of Step, a giant leap into finance
"We believe that MrBeast and Beast Industries are the most outstanding content creators of our generation, with unparalleled influence and user engagement among Generation Z, Generation Alpha, and Millennials," he said. "Beast Industries is the largest and most innovative creator platform in the world, and our corporate values align closely with our personal values."
In January of this year, the largest ETH treasury company, Bitmine, announced a $200 million investment in MrBeast's holding company. Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee stated that he believes MrBeast's future platform will play a key role in the digital finance sector.
MrBeast's financial layout first gained widespread attention when his company submitted a trademark application for "MRBEAST FINANCIAL" in October 2025, encompassing everything from basic accounts to credit, investment, and even crypto and DeFi under the same brand narrative.
Public entries show that the financial services covered by this trademark are extensive, including mobile banking service software, short-term microloans, credit and debit card issuance and transaction processing, investment management, investment banking services, insurance, financial consulting, and "financial health education," as well as crypto payment processing and "crypto asset exchange through decentralized exchanges (DEX)."
On February 9, 2026, Beast Industries officially announced the acquisition of Step, formally entering the financial industry. As a fintech platform aimed at the next generation, Step claims to have over 7 million users and emphasizes that it has a "full-stack fintech team," aiming to provide products related to financial literacy and financial management. The platform's financial products are supported by their partner bank, Evolve Bank & Trust (Member FDIC).
Step's core demographic is teenagers and Gen Z, highly overlapping with MrBeast's audience structure. This means that this acquisition allows MrBeast to gain access to an existing banking-as-a-service structure, card issuance capabilities, and teams, and then leverage his strongest skills—traffic and distribution—to acquire users and provide education.
Traditional fintech customer acquisition is extremely expensive, while MrBeast possesses a top global attention funnel. This enables his conversion and retention chains to theoretically be more efficient than typical financial apps: first, using content to build trust, then implementing financial education and basic account products as landing points, and gradually expanding into clearer compliance scenarios like credit building, debit/prepaid cards. Products targeting young people like Step are naturally suited for a "financial enlightenment" narrative. In an ideal state of high account engagement, the long-term contribution (LTV) of financial products per customer will also significantly exceed that of food retail.
However, potential issues exist here. Even though Step's positioning is financial education and basic accounts, any involvement with teenagers raises moral scrutiny standards. For example, in communities like Reddit, many users' evaluations of MrBeast's acquisition of Step are "Why is he always targeting teenagers?" and are questioned as "inducing minors to borrow" while intending to treat fans as a pool of traffic to exploit.
Trusting a creator to provide entertainment content is completely different from trusting him to manage children's financial foundations; whether parents are willing to hand over their kids' financial entry points to a brand known for "high stimulation, strong entertainment" remains questionable.
Moreover, looking at MrBeast's methodology since his rise, he excels in delivering high-intensity stimulation and substantial rewards as gimmicks to achieve wide viral dissemination, but financial regulators are highly sensitive to "gamification, lottery-type, strong inducement."
MrBeast's high-drama style may conflict with the restraint required by financial compliance. Financial companies have much lower tolerances than snack brands; once technical issues, complaints, or information disclosure disputes occur, the public will blame all responsibility on MrBeast and his brand.
In fact, such public backlash has already played out in the cryptocurrency sector. In recent years, MrBeast's investment actions in cryptocurrencies have sparked controversy. PANews has previously reported on-chain investigations revealing that he might be using his influence for "pump and dump" operations. Under enormous public pressure, MrBeast and his team began a series of PR operations aimed at dissociating themselves.
MrBeast now holds a scarce traffic card, but whether this card will be played into a more inclusive, transparent, and strictly self-disciplined "financial enlightenment journey," or turned into a shortcut for growth aimed at the most sensitive teenage demographic, only he knows.
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