By the end of this post it should no longer feel unrealistic to claim that Mr. Beast has a viable path towards total world domination, as well as the potential to assume a monopoly over global affairs and geopolitics that would make Genghis Khan turn in his grave - but I'll have to take you back 88 years ago to where media manipulation first began to take shape.
It's October 30th and the year is 1938. Families across America are huddled around household radios, listening intently - a familiar nighttime ritual - when suddenly their ears are assaulted by 23-year-old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre's radio adaptation of The War of The Worlds.
This story is often told with a healthy amount of exaggeration, with claims that millions of listeners were led to believe an actual alien invasion was occurring in the United States, and without knowing any better, these millions of Americans apparently lost their minds. An appropriate reaction, as even the heaviest consumers of 1930s media would not even register in a dataset analyzing the ways in which we consume content in 2026.
A study conducted by Hadley Cantril two years later found that only a fraction of the six million listeners (around 1.2 million) took it as an actual news broadcast. But it doesn't really matter how many were legitimately frightened, or what actually occurred that evening.
From that day forward the United States' relationship to media was forever changed by a young Orson Welles, successfully captivating millions with nothing but spoken word and an abundance of airtime.
Over 75 years later, an even younger man going by the name of Jimmy Donaldson would create a YouTube channel and morph the media landscape into his own image, far beyond what anyone could have imagined.
In late 2024 a leaked internal memo written by Mr. Beast spread across the internet like wildfire, titled HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION - over 30 pages written by Jimmy himself, intended to help new hires get up to speed on how business is handled in the land of the beast.
The memo received an insane amount of attention because prior to its release, individuals operating in legacy media had failed to analyze just how powerful the beast empire was becoming.
To most, Jimmy was only the most popular guy on YouTube, with many failing to realize that the most powerful guy on the most relevant platform is actually a major threat to their business.
Since then, the beast empire has been growing at a ridiculous pace, continuing to accumulate power within the entity known as Beast Industries - Jimmy's media conglomerate valued at roughly $5 billion.
In early January it was announced that Tom Lee's Bitmine Immersion Technologies invested $200 million into Beast Industries. Bloomberg recently reported MrBeast makes most of his revenue from Feastables chocolate bars - not YouTube. Just last week, Beast Industries acquired financial services app, Step, to expand into youth-focused financial services.
HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION was a glimpse into the previously very private mind of Jimmy - a personal account detailing lessons from over a decade of content optimization.
The memo detailed how this path to near-total autonomy over our attention landscape was less a spray-and-pray approach to brute forcing viewer interests, but a meticulous process of making sure every second of every video is optimized, all the way down to the words that are said, who's saying them, and what's being shown to viewers.
I counted how many times the camera cut to a different shot in the "Ages 1 - 100 Race For $250,000!" video and lost track, but it was well over 40 - all within the first sixty seconds.
Orson Welles was able to redefine how we consumed media, and he made history, pulling a fast one on just a few million.
Jimmy Donaldson is proof that we might not fully grasp the power that comes from commanding billions of eyeballs, doing this at a time where attention spans are quickly becoming the scarcest resource in America.
Welles' War of the Worlds incident is widely referenced despite it only reaching 5% of the population in a brief instant; yet somehow an audience of over 1.4 billion unique viewers that's compounded at a historic rate is under-discussed.
I'm writing this because Jimmy is only 27 years old, and I increasingly get the impression that he's on track to become one of the most influential figures to ever live.
If this trajectory continues, the ascendance of the beast will inevitably lead to some very unique problems that the United States is ill-equipped to solve.
Towards the end I'll discuss the concept of Andrew Kortina's attention tax and why this might be a reasonable solution to slowing the spread of the beast. I'll also juxtapose the rise of Jimmy with Donald Trump's unprecedented run as a two-time winner of the US Presidential Election, as well as determine whether or not the Clavicular Cinematic Universe might pose a threat to the beast empire.
You'll come to realize that maybe human attention is the most valuable commodity in the world, and by the time we bothered to take notice, it was already too late.
As much as you might scoff at the idea of sitting down and watching a MrBeast video, there are hundreds of millions on the opposite end of the spectrum, those regularly taking the time to consume content across MrBeast's vast media empire.
Maybe you or I aren't interested in spending 17 minutes and 22 seconds to learn about the difference between a $1 vs. $500,000 date, but there are well over 100 million who regularly show up to do just this, 100 million that will consistently show up to listen to the gospel of the beast with bated breath.
Outside of the main channel’s 467 million subscribers, there's Beast Philanthropy, MrBeast Gaming (structurally this channel is quite similar to main content), Beast Reacts, MrBeast 2, and Beast Animations, with over 170 million subscribers amongst these five other channels. Beyond YouTube, chocolate, and the recent fintech acquisition, Beast Industries includes Beast Games ($100m+ deal w/ Amazon Prime Video), Lunchly, MrBeast Burger, Beast Land, MrBeast Lab (toys), an upcoming novel, and Beast Mobile.
Oh, and they also frequently post on TikTok, which is about as optimized as you would expect.
The empire has been designed to find you wherever you are online, and more recently, increasingly in the physical world.
For the average person, being online can be equated with using social media - YouTube itself is a form of social media, but it's 1-of-1, considering the platform has now grown to become the #1 venue for media consumption.
YouTube has become the home page of the internet, dictating the stories that will sit atop home pages across the country. Via Sundar Pichai's condensed Q4 earnings notes:
"In the living room, YouTube continues to be the number one streamer in the US for nearly three years. From the NFL to Coachella, YouTube is where people watch today's biggest popular culture moments unfold."
It's typical for content creators to gain a following on social media and gradually lose that audience over time, whether it comes through stagnation or algorithmic displacement.
For the most part, this decline in viewership is just the natural state of media, not limited solely to YouTubers or internet-first media forms - media is always in a state of replacement.
Going to a movie theater, listening to a live celebrity interview on television, or even listening to the radio have been slowly phased out via more convenient information rails. Even now, the media landscape and competition for attention is more contested than ever, most visible in TBPN's media market map:
While the run of the MrBeast channel has yet to eclipse the length of these other once dominant media forms, it's undeniable that creating content today is more difficult than ever - everyone has a camera and internet access in their pocket via cell phones.
Algorithms are the determining factor that sit between a creator's content being served to millions or a select few. Algorithms reward different things, and every platform has its own algorithm(s) designed to serve content in unique ways. Spotify has a different mandate for measuring user retention than Instagram or TikTok, and so on.
YouTube is an outlier, as they possess a structural advantage in content recommendation, given its existence as a business within Alphabet, and the massive amounts of data Alphabet has collected on billions of individuals across the globe.
YouTube might be able to better structure recommendations for individuals based on factors like their age, what type of interests they have (measured via Google searches), and what time of day they are likely to be viewing content.
If a middle schooler is opening YouTube before 8am on a Tuesday, maybe the algorithm immediately opens YouTube Shorts rather than a feed of videos they don't have time to focus on before class. If a thirty year-old software developer is opening YouTube at 10pm on a Saturday, maybe the algorithm assumes he's just smoked a joint, recommending him a series of longer video essays to enjoy.
YouTube knows what content you want, just as Jimmy put in the work to understand human desires and what keeps people coming back for more.
What's most impressive about the idea with Jimmy is that not only has he been able to maintain this massive audience and compound it in the face of algorithmic warfare, but consistently deliver larger and larger spectacles designed to keep viewers coming back.
It used to be enough to buy out a grocery store or purchase a private island, but the stakes are higher - you need to be saving 1,000 animals from dying or trapping someone in a burning building for a $500,000 reward.
It's interesting to go back to 2022 or 2023, and look at what content was being posted on the main channel. We don't yet know what we want to see, but Jimmy does. And he'll do anything in his power to keep delivering, as he's done for years now.
When monopolies are covered in economics courses, the Dutch East India Company (or VOC) is at the very least pulled into the discussion, even though it's easier to dissect Standard Oil given data available. I mention VOC because it's widely considered to be the most dominant monopoly of all time, and it's hard to fully grasp the scale of the company.
Even its peak inflation-adjusted valuation alone is ridiculous, supposedly resting in the $5-10 trillion range.
This number might seem more reasonable in 2026, when rumors are being floated of a SpaceX IPO at a $1.5 trillion opening price, but VOC was the only game in town, and it's not like there was a globally connected economy to allow for multiple, trillion dollar enterprises to co-exist. VOC had a monopoly on everything there was to have a monopoly on, and they even had an army and authority that rivaled existing nation states.
We've grown as a global population since then - even accounting for the Standard Oil outlier - and today, it would be very difficult for a single corporation to achieve a monopoly of that scale. At least, it would be difficult to achieve a monopoly of that scale, in a business sense.
But what about a monopoly on attention, one that cascades into the most dominant, impenetrable distribution engine any one person or entity has ever achieved?
I feel that the story of John F. Kennedy's rise and unlikely victory in 1960 has become a bit of a meme, similar to the tall tale of Orson Welles' 1938 experiment.
The rumor is that because the young JFK v. then-VP Nixon was the first election where debates were nationally televised, JFK was able to edge a win out over Nixon because he was just too good looking and American women showed up in droves to support him.
This is only half true, because the first nationally televised presidential debates technically occurred four years earlier in 1956, but instead of the candidates presenting to the public, for some reason, Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Chase Smith presented the candidates' viewpoints as surrogates for television audiences.
1960 was probably the first instance where national media played a major role in deciding something as consequential as the country's next president, but it was also a moment where someone's aura mattered more than their track record.
JFK was 43 years old when he was elected, becoming the youngest person to ever win the presidential election, but not necessarily the youngest president ever. Technically, Theodore Roosevelt became president when he was 42 years old, but this came after he succeeded McKinley after his untimely death.
While JFK might have had the most presidential-dependent aura for a few decades within history books, nothing compares to what Donald Trump has been able to accomplish in the years since, managing to leapfrog from real estate mogul to host of NBC's The Apprentice, all the way to The Oval Office (for two terms) without any political experience.
There are many factors that go into how Trump was able to achieve this, but I think the most important underlying thread is that he was very well known amongst the general American public, made people laugh on TV, and had enough charm to go from a long shot candidate to one of the more infamous characters in American history, all without needing to do anything he wouldn't already be trying to do.
Trump’s initial presidential run was a publicity stunt, and outside of capital invested, the race for a presidential bid posed zero reputational risk, with the potential for uncapped upside in the event of a victory.
Adam Curtis' 2016 documentary HyperNormalization offers the best analysis of this rise in Trump's image and some of the contributing factors that took place in decades prior, explaining how America has stumbled its way down the weird path we now find ourselves traversing.
While Jimmy Donaldson is not nearly as charismatic as Donald Trump, I think we should consider the possibility that a time will come where Jimmy is legally of age to run for president, and by this point he'll have experienced roughly ten more years of empire, brand, and personal growth.
In fact, he's already gotten much better at public speaking - a major part of the aspiring president's toolkit. Note the difference in his demeanor on this November 2024 episode of Cold Ones, compared to his more recent discussion with Andrew Sorkin two months ago.
At a certain point there will probably be nothing left for Beast Industries to conquer but the United States itself.
And while Jimmy might not have the aura, he’s widely regarded as the YouTube guy, or the guy that can do crazy shit and pull it off.
Just as many Americans vaguely knew Trump as a real estate guy, it might not matter how Jimmy presents himself if he's able to conduct the appearance of aura on a national stage. Fake it till you make it.
Beast Industries' acquisition of Step seems like less of an investment and more of an experiment in observing just how far the MrBeast brand can extend its influence. If this is successful and tens of millions of young, impressionable Americans begin to associate the word finance with MrBeast, then God help us all.
Kevin Spacey's character in House of Cards said something about power being worth more than money, and if this is the case, then I'd argue that power over money, when coupled with additional power, is the most powerful thing of them all.
Since 2016 the idea of celebrities running for president has been floated around - most notably involving Dwayne Johnson or LeBron James - though much of this has been a meme and limited analysis exists on the concept. I respect The Rock and I'll always appreciate LeBron after he brought Cleveland a championship, but neither of them have that maniacal business drive that exists within Jimmy.
"I’m willing to count to one hundred thousand, bury myself alive, or walk a marathon in the world’s largest pairs of shoes if I must. I just want to do what makes me happy and ultimately the viewers happy. This channel is my baby and I've given up my life for it." - via HOW TO SUCCEED AT MRBEAST PRODUCTION
Maybe selling Beast Burgers and facilitating a real life Squid Games doesn't mean a lot compared to real business like running a hedge fund or working your way up in American politics, but people didn't care about Donald Trump's lack of political experience.
There are hundreds of millions that jump at any product or video the beast apparatus puts out, and a presidential bid would be just another stunt for the team to pull off.
Jimmy is without a doubt successful, very adaptive to industry trends, and he isn't even thirty. If it's true that kids overwhelmingly want to become full-time streamers when they grow up - they've fully grown up on new media - it isn't a stretch to assume Jimmy will have a very supportive voter base.
If you pair this with billions of eyeballs directed towards the beast empire (growing minute retention 28% YoY), declining attention spans amongst all age groups in the US, and a population who's quickly becoming functionally illiterate, it's hard not to see a world where this is more of a default option than an exercise of the imagination.
But despite children and younger age groups supporting Jimmy, even the decision to publish content on YouTube has its issues, as platforms like Twitch and Kick have quickly adapted to fill a gap in the fragmented attention-based economy.
Long-form video is no match for short-form video, but ephemeral video - like a live stream - is better than all of this, primarily because it's so much better suited to get layered into the world of short-form video.
We can't pay attention to a twenty minute video or a three hour, unedited live stream - but it's infinitely easier to scroll through short clips of Clavicular getting drive-by mogged at a night club or running someone over with his car, than it is to clip thirty seconds of a MrBeast video.
Optimizing a video's hook and re-engaging viewers consistently for 15+ minutes is vastly different from creating despicably entertaining pieces of content that are only meant to last thirty seconds.
Demographics matter too, and the audience for someone like Clavicular might be more likely to listen to a Nick Fuentes podcast on their way to work than throw on a two hour stream of Clavicular scrolling socials. But this same individual can just as easily be served clipped content on Instagram Reels or YT Shorts to substitute for their lack of innate interest in the livestream medium - especially given how much of this streaming content relies on irl meetups, connections, or fringe interactions between streaming subcultures.
Streaming was primarily a venue for viewers to watch entertaining personalities or the best eSports athletes play games live, but it’s now morphed into a type of hyper-online, always-on reality TV show that can’t be found anywhere else.
The growth of this new paradigm in streaming does pose some level of threat to the beast empire, but there’s enough evidence to suggest the pursuit of algorithmic dominance (across media formats) is something Jimmy is astute at.
There are probably hundreds of individuals that could fulfill the role of Clavicular in modern media, and he isn't inherently talented at what he does - taking drugs on stream, going out, and causing a scene for millions worldwide to observe throughout the day.
But just as Clav could never swap places with Jimmy for a day, it would be equally as impossible for Jimmy to swap places with Clav for a day. These are two very different personality types suitable for their respective audiences alone.
Content centered around Clav or other "day-in-the-life" streamers is very, very entertaining and almost nothing can compete with this level of spectacle, and you could argue the spectacles accomplished by Beast and Crew aren't enough to satisfy how quickly audiences are demanding net-new sources of dopamine.
I still believe there's a path to salvation, though it might be too late to exit this timeline without making some tough policy decisions in the near future.
In a 2018 essay, Andrew Kortina discussed the idea of an attention tax, and ever since I read it, I've been wanting to incorporate it into an essay - I believe the time has finally come.
There's now sufficient public debate over the ethics of short-form video content, as well as this critique of this 24/7/365 online existence we're being forced into. Essays like this one from Ben Roy really get to the bottom of why it feels so unfulfilling spending as much time as we do on the internet.
Kortina's main idea was a proposal for a tax on attention, something I believe has become more relevant with each passing day in the eight years since its publication. The essay's core argument comes from analyzing a declining labor force participation rate amongst young men, accelerated or caused by:
"(i) a decrease in cost of access to media entertainment leisure, (ii) increases in both the availability and (iii) quality media entertainment leisure, and (iv) a decrease in the marginal signaling utility of (conspicuous) consumption goods for all but the highest earners."
There wasn't TikTok in 2018, and there definitely wasn't AI slop. After I first read the essay two years back, I thought the attention tax was too radical or unrealistic to squeeze any insights out of. But if a policy like this were proposed in the US as early as tomorrow, I'd bet it would be favored by at least 10-15% of the population - largely favored by younger generations who are more exposed to brain rot's first-order effects on American youth.
Part of what's so concerning is as far back as 2017, in Aguiar and Hurst's analysis, young men reported being happier despite "stagnant wages, declining employment rates, and an increased propensity to live with their parents." While the paper argues video games are the main culprit, 2026 has shown that short-form video content via TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts has targeted all age groups and restructured the way our time is spent.
The basic function of an attention tax would revolve around a federal government (or even state authority) setting the price of one hour of human attention to minimum wage rate, and charging tech companies 10-12% of that wage rate for every hour of human attention they consume.
This would lead to advertisers being charged more - reducing ad quantity and/or directly lowering large rev source for tech companies - or the individuals themselves being charged, undoubtedly reducing time spent online, and theoretically circulating human ingenuity and attention back into the real world.
The attention tax concept is useful, even if it's far-fetched, because it's almost universally agreed on that spending too much time on the internet isn't worthwhile, and while it's possible to make a living creating content, most individuals aren't producing content on the internet - they are only consuming.
Put simply, all of us would be better off with lower daily average screen times.
What used to be referred to as consumption culture is more identifiable as a standard or default way of life in the 2020s. Technology has enabled convenience, but at the cost of our humanity and previous way of life, that wasn't so bad.
The issue is that content produced on Mr. Beast's main channel isn't bad, and consuming it can be occasionally enjoyable, even if it falls into your definition of slop.
Even more of a shock is demographic statistics from 2024’s HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION showing the audience is overwhelmingly full of adults aged between 18-44, though it’s possible that YouTube doesn’t provide data for individuals younger than 13, or despite the existence of YouTube Kids accounts, kids are just using their parents’ accounts.
While writing this I thought a lot about algorithms and content optimization, mainly focusing on how I could try to write something that will keep people entertained from the moment they click, all the way through the 15-20 minutes after they've finished reading these 4,000+ words.
I'm not sure it's fully possible to keep someone's attention throughout an entire piece of my writing, but I'd like to think I'm inching closer towards cracking this code. Publishing something for Substack is different than publishing on X, and there are many unique reader profiles you need to account for.
It's especially difficult on here, because you're competing with far more than only the written word - I don't hold a candle to the spectacle of Seedance 2.0 generated content.
Regardless, I hope you enjoy everything I have to say. Even if there's too much of it.
