Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTube celebrity better known as MrBeast, became popular for broadcasting outlandish but charitable stunts that often involved giving away giant piles of money.

Now the 27-year-old is asking his followers to entrust him with theirs. With the acquisition of Step, a financial services app for teenagers and young adults that claims to have over 7 million users, MrBeast has essentially become a banker, too.

Donaldson has a larger following on YouTube than anyone else on Earth; his 469 million subscribers outnumber the U.S. population, and a significant number haven’t yet graduated from high school. Jeffrey Housenbold, the CEO of his company, who arrived in 2024 to help oversee the growing enterprise, has called him the most popular guy in the world, with roughly 1.4 billion people around the globe watching his content in the last three months.

Beyond YouTube, there’s a reality contest on Amazon Prime Video, chocolate bars, burgers, a nascent mobile phone service and even a thriller with novelist James Patterson.

Now Donaldson is wading into more highly regulated and consequential terrain. The question is, what does he plan to do once he arrives there?

The Step app offers spending, savings and investment accounts, the latter of which parents supervise for the sub-18 set. It also issues a secured card, which draws on deposits for spending, similar to how a debit card does. The catch — and it’s a good one, potentially — is that it can help young people build their credit standing.

Those investing accounts are where teenagers, especially, could run into trouble. Housenbold believes crypto is a viable asset class — and in January, Beast Industries received a $200 million investment from Bitmine Immersion Technologies, a digital asset platform. Bitmine is led by Tom Lee, whose goal is to own 5% of the supply of the cryptocurrency ether.

It might seem like the new owner intends to nudge millions of teenagers into becoming crypto gamblers. But Housenbold said the company, based in Greenville, North Carolina, had bigger ambitions for its financial services platform, with a heavy emphasis on financial education and philanthropy. And Donaldson has said he wants to provide his followers the financial basics he lacked as a younger person.

“Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up,” Donaldson said in a recent social media post. “That’s exactly why we’re joining forces with Step! I want to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had.”

What he has said

As young as he is, Donaldson is not a blank slate on personal finance matters and has said some sensible things about money.

In an interview with Jon Youshaei, a creator, Donaldson said he had been awakened to the power of investing as a teenager while watching a gamer play Call of Duty on YouTube. That gamer talked about the magic of compound interest and how his investment portfolio had grown from thousands into a couple of million dollars.

“And it, like, blew my brain,” Donaldson said to Youshaei. “I wasn’t even watching him to learn about finances.”

Even before acquiring Step, Donaldson had spoken publicly about the possibility of creating a YouTube channel with personal finance content. There, he said, he might talk about things like Roth individual retirement accounts (which Step does not yet offer) and do for his younger viewers what the gamer, known as Woody, did for him.

What he has done

Like many high-profile digital creators his age, Donaldson is curious about cryptocurrency and related investment opportunities.

In a 2021 interview with YouTube personalities Logan Paul and Mike Majlak, Paul said Donaldson had called him recently and said he had put $1.5 million into bitcoin. Donaldson laughed and said, “Let’s go,” with a profanity between the two words.

During the interview, he also talked about his investments in several CryptoPunks, a type of nonfungible token, or NFT. He did so, he said, on the recommendation of Gary Vaynerchuk, an entrepreneur and author who frequently rounded up influential digital creators to suggest investment opportunities. Some of those bets returned 20 or 30 times the money he had laid out, he told his interviewers.

“Jimmy would be the first to admit this is why financial literacy is so important, especially for proud-talking young founders like himself,” Housenbold said.

Donaldson’s trading has come under scrutiny in crypto circles in the past. A company representative said the allegations had no factual merit.

Like many founders, Donaldson has most of his net worth tied up in his company, according to Housenbold — so much so that Donaldson recently said he was going to need to borrow from his mother to pay for his wedding.

The Beast financial plan

Housenbold and Donaldson were introduced by one of Beast Industries’ investors and have been working together for nearly two years.

The pair’s vision is ambitious. Housenbold acknowledges that financial services are a commodity — and believes that branding and ease of use can set providers apart.

A brief trademark application the company filed last year for “MrBeast Financial” envisioned loan products like cash advances and credit cards and mentioned cryptocurrency four times.

They draw the line at memecoins, volatile novelty currencies rooted in internet jokes or other trends, but they’d like to introduce their own stablecoin, a digital coin that acts like a substitute for the dollar.

The company’s plan may sound familiar, because it follows the blueprint of many financial services firms that came before it, most recently Robinhood, which started with investing before expanding into a full suite of other products and services. Before that, SoFi became known for its private student loans but is now a bank that also offers crypto trading.

MrBeast has a unique opportunity. Housenbold said the company would be able to spend less on acquiring customers than its competitors — and it will be able to pass on those savings to customers in the form of a lower interest rate on loans or a higher rate on savings, for example, while still turning a profit.

“The reach is unprecedented, and we know how to tell stories,” Housenbold said. “We know how to gamify things. We know how to make things viral. We know how to connect with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.”

There was also a crypto component. Step announced plans in 2022 for a new crypto and stock investment product and said it was “the first financial app that will allow both teens under 18 and young adults to buy, sell, hold and receive crypto.” Then, the company quietly shut the option down.

Step’s crypto capability was a “net side benefit” but not a driving factor in their deal, according to Housenbold. Still, he is a believer in decentralized finance — which takes middlemen out of the equation — and can envision a future where financial products run on a global computing network with its own digital currency.

The endeavor also raises questions about conflicts of interest. There was a time, not that long ago, when big financial personalities like Suze Orman drew criticism for pitching financial products.

Donaldson may be admired by many for his YouTube philanthropy, but his ventures and behavior haven’t escaped criticism. Over a dozen contestants who participated in “Beast Games,” his reality competition show, which carries a $5 million prize, for example, said that they hadn’t received adequate food or medical care. And earlier on, he was called out for a poor working environment, as well as using slurs and offensive terms.

Most recently, one of his employees was fined and temporarily suspended from Kalshi, the prediction-market platform, for allegedly making almost perfect bets using nonpublic information related to MrBeast’s show.

Housenbold said the company was committed to doing the right thing and would reward customers when they exhibited responsible financial behaviors of their own.

“You could do great while doing great,” Housenbold said, adding that the company has taken on extra costs to ethically source its chocolate, Feastables. “It’s endemic to our brand.”

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