‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube starView image in fullscreen Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast (centre, in grey jumper) giving away a car during a promotional tour for his confectionary brand in Sydney, Australia. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAPJimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. In this profile Mark O’Connell tries to grasp the scale of Donaldson’s role in modern popular culture:“I don’t intend to make a case here that you should start appreciatively watching Donaldson’s videos. I don’t intend to make a case for MrBeast as art – although I reserve the right to talk about it as though it were. I’m not even going to try to convince you that these videos are even necessarily good, whatever that might mean.
