The digital age has bred a new type of philanthropist: online content creators with huge followings and platforms to share issues they care about. YouTuber MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has the biggest subscriber count on the site.
This weekend, Donaldson—reportedly worth $2.6 billion—posted a video sharing the process of building a village in Ghana, complete with houses, a school, toilet facilities, a marketplace, a community farm, and a well.
The creator said he spent $10 million building the village named Abna Dakwa, which also included infrastructure changes to drainage around the existing settlement to stop it from flooding.
Donaldson’s aim is to keep families and children out of illegal labor, with Donaldson writing on social media platform X that his 14-year career on YouTube so far had been leading up to the humanitarian project, which took eight months to complete.
But Donaldson, known for his catchy video titles such as Escape 100 cops, win $500,000′and 7 days stranded on an island, acknowledged that his audience may not engage as enthusiastically with his philanthropic work compared to his light-hearted and dramatic videos.
“It prob won’t perform that well, but it’s something I care a lot about and I hope my passion for it shines through,” Donaldson, 28, wrote on X ahead of the video release.
When a follower pointed out that MrBeast’s humanitarian videos tend to get less than other content, Donaldson doubled down. He responded: “It’s funny when people say I only help people for views because it’s literally the opposite lol. Doesn’t matter though, helping people brings me purpose, and even if no one watches, I’ll keep making them.”
Admittedly, Donaldson’s audience may not fully understand what philanthropy is yet: His core viewership skews heavily toward ages 11 to 24, with the strongest concentration among middle schoolers through younger university students. By contrast, the age of the average philanthropist in the U.S. is 64 years old, according to the National Philanthropic Trust.
However, Donaldson’s commitment to similar projects in the future echoes trends observed in children of wealthy families. Katherine Lorenz, who leads the Next Gen group—a network of heirs and family members involved in shaping philanthropic strategy—at Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge, recently told Fortune that young heirs are pushing their parents to give away cash more quickly.
“I see more younger generation folks pushing on their parents to give more,” Lorenz told Fortune. “[They’re saying], ‘You made enough money, mom and dad. It’s time to give it away and to give it away faster.’”
Donaldson’s philanthropic work
The scale of Donaldson’s town build also extended to offering free school meals to pupils at the newly-built school for five years, as the team behind the scheme hoped this would encourage children and their families to stay in education, rather than beginning illegal work.
The latest project is part of a wider goal of Donaldson’s Beast Philanthropy non-profit, which aims to eradicate child labor in Ghana. Other targets include bringing clean water to millions of people, delivering more than 48 million meals to those who are food insecure, and planting more than 25 million trees.
One user questioned why Donaldson wasn’t doing more for Greenville, North Carolina, where the creator grew up and now has his operational headquarters. The entrepreneur replied on X: “If I listed all the philanthropic things we do locally I literally wouldn’t be able to fit it in this tweet.”
