What’s it like to work for MrBeast, the biggest YouTuber in the world, according to 5 former staffers

• Jimmy Donaldson, or MrBeast on YouTube, is one of the most successful YouTubers in the world.
• He’s amassed billions of views on videos that include incredible stunts and challenges.
• Insider spoke with five people who’d worked for MrBeast about what their jobs were like.

Britt Carter was having lunch with her parents in Greenville, North Carolina, one autumn day in 2022 when she received a call from her manager.

“Hey, don’t come back to the office,” her manager had said. “Go home and get a bag.” I require that you drive to the Great Smoky Mountains.” Her manager explained that their next video would feature retired Great Smoky Mountains Railroad trains crashing into brick walls.

Carter, unfazed by the request, hopped in her car and drove six hours across state to meet her team.

Carter was working as a creative producer for MrBeast at the time, one of YouTube’s most subscribed creators, and that video, which also included experiments like destroying a Lamborghini with a hydraulic press and filling a pool with one billion Orbeez, now has over 200 million views.

“You had to be prepared for anything,” Carter explained. “It was an all-hands-on-deck, all-the-time kind of thing.”

Many of YouTube’s top creators, like MrBeast, have progressed from sitting in front of a camera and using iMovie to film and upload clips to becoming full-fledged media companies.

According to Oxford Economics, by 2022, YouTube’s creative ecosystem will have contributed more than $35 billion to the US GDP and supported more than 390,000 full-time equivalent US jobs.

According to Forbes, MrBeast is the most impressive example of this, with a company of about 250 employees and an estimated gross revenue of $82 million between June 2022 and June 2023. MrBeast typically has job openings ranging from hyper-specific roles like “thumbnail designer” — the person in charge of designing the small image that previews the content of a YouTube video next to its title — to simply “creative.”

Insider spoke with 17 current and former employees of top YouTube stars, including five from MrBeast. They described days filled with unbelievable stunts, erratic work hours, and disparities in pay. It was also the job of a lifetime for many of them.

“You’d have days where everything was going wrong, working so hard and physically killing yourself to make something happen,” Carter said of her six-month stint at MrBeast. “But then, the next day, you’d pull off these incredible stunts and pieces of content, and you were on such a high that it makes you forget all those hard hours and days.”

The ‘MrBeast-ification of YouTube’

MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, popularized a type of content that focuses on mind-boggling stunts and challenges — sometimes with cash prizes worth thousands of dollars — spawning a phenomenon that a fellow YouTuber has dubbed the “MrBeast-ification of YouTube.”

Donaldson has become a fixture in Greenville, where he grew up and now runs his business. Many of his employees are on-site to help with video production. According to The Washington Post, the company owns five homes in one neighborhood that house Donaldson’s friends and employees.

Three of the five former employees interviewed by Insider were asked to relocate to Greenville to work on-site, while two were able to work remotely. The company provided housing for two of the on-site employees, according to two of them.

Marc Kaplan, a remote employee who worked as a production coordinator for the company for seven months, said he rarely worked more than the standard nine-to-five hours. Others, like Carter, found themselves working far more than 40 hours per week.

“It’s 100% addictive to live that life,” she went on to say.

Carter described other outlandish tasks she was given, such as when Donaldson wanted a circus tent branded in pink and blue, the MrBeast colors, for a video.

“He had seen a photo online of this circus tent that he loved the look of,” she went on to say. “At that point in the concept, we didn’t have enough time to order one to those specifications.” So my task became to figure out who owned that tent, where that specific tent was, and then go buy it from them.”

Working at MrBeast, according to the employees Insider spoke with, meant pushing the boundaries of what a YouTube video could achieve. If Donaldson is dissatisfied with a video, he is known for scrapping it, regardless of how much time and money it took to create it.

“Everyone understood that the company’s mission was to create the best video possible.” “That came first, before anything else,” Carter explained. “That was always the intention. If there was something that could improve the video, you would always prioritize what could produce better content.”

Another former MrBeast employee who worked as a producer said they had to negotiate with the Japanese government to get permission to film around Tokyo’s famous Shibuya Crossing for a video in which Donaldson and his friends would be driving go-karts through the streets.

“The stuff I was able to negotiate for them in Japan, in such a short period of time, in a country that has a lot of rules working against them, was insane,” this individual was quoted as saying. “A lot of doors open up when you have that attitude.”

More information about working for top YouTube creators can be found here:

You can have the job if you can find me a zebra: What it’s like working for top YouTube stars, according to 17 current and former employees of MrBeast and Kai Cenat.