How MrBeast Built a Business Empire Out of YouTube Videos

HOOK0:00 to 0:45

In 2024, MrBeast's video business lost almost $80 million. That's YouTube plus his Amazon show, according to investor documents seen by Bloomberg.

That same year, his chocolate bar made more than $20 million in profit. If you make videos for a living, that sounds backwards.

But his own CEO has called the videos a marketing investment in everything else the company does. And in 2026, an internal deck showed the chocolate slowing down, the same year the company bought a banking app.

So what is this machine actually built to sell, and is it still working?

MOVE 1: OVERSPEND ON PURPOSE0:45 to 2:55

Start with what one video costs. An average video on the main MrBeast channel cost between $3 million and $4 million, people familiar with the company's finances told Bloomberg in early 2025.

And there's only so much money a channel can make on YouTube when it posts a couple of videos a month. On paper, that's a bad deal. So why keep spending like that?

Because the expensive videos are the ones that open doors. His Squid Game recreation had 456 players competing for $456,000. Back in 2021, he put the cost at $3.5 million. By April 2026 it had more than 915 million views, and TIME says it helped carry his reality-show style onto episodic TV.

That TV show became Beast Games. Amazon paid him about $100 million for season one, which Bloomberg called one of the most expensive deals in the history of reality TV. Then he spent more than that. Bloomberg reported that at one point during filming, he decided on the spot to double the prize money for the contestants. The top prize ended up at $10 million.

The company lost money on season one. He's said himself that he lost tens of millions of dollars on that show.

But look at what the money bought. According to TIME, Beast Games drew more than 50 million viewers in under a month, the biggest unscripted premiere in Prime Video's history.

And he keeps doing it. He told TIME, quote, "We reinvest almost all the money into more content."

So that's move one. Spend more than the video can earn back, because the reach is what you're really paying for.

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But reach is just a number until it sells something, which brings us to move two.

MOVE 2: TURN A VIDEO INTO A LAUNCH2:55 to 5:15

In 2021, MrBeast started a chocolate company called Feastables, with help from the former president of the protein bar brand RXBar.

The launch is the part worth studying. They gave away prizes, and some of the winners got invited into a MrBeast video to compete for $500,000. The product launch and the video were basically the same event.

At first the bars were only sold at Walmart. Since then they've expanded into Europe, Africa and Asia.

And the move hasn't changed. When TIME followed him for its April 2026 profile, he walked into a Walmart Supercenter to give away Nintendo Switch consoles, on camera, because Feastables was selling a limited-edition snack tied to the new Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

Now Bloomberg's numbers. In 2024, Feastables did about $250 million in sales. More than $20 million of that was profit. The media business did similar sales and lost almost $80 million. So no, the chocolate didn't cover the videos on its own. The whole company still lost almost $60 million that year. A leaked investor deck from early 2025, reviewed by Business Insider, put the media loss even higher.

Still, Bloomberg frames those losses another way. The entertainment side is increasingly a way to sell other products. The videos build the audience, and the products are where that audience turns into money.

Notice what this setup depends on, though. The guy selling the chocolate is the same guy starring in the videos. Hold onto that, because it's about to become the problem.

MOVE 3: BRING IN THE ADULTS5:15 to 7:40

Move three is the least flashy one. In 2024, MrBeast set out to hire Jeff Housenbold, the former CEO of Shutterfly, who took that company public. According to TIME, MrBeast called and texted him more than 10 times over three days to get him to join. Housenbold became CEO of Beast Industries that September.

Investors were already betting on the machine. In early 2025, Bloomberg reported that a funding round led by the investment firm Alpha Wave had put $300 million into Beast Industries. It valued the company at about $5 billion, more than three times its value a few months earlier. That's for a company that had lost money three years in a row.

A big part of Housenbold's job was cutting spending. In August 2025, Business Insider reported that the company used to pay retail price for a lot of what shows up in the videos. Drinks, gym equipment, even the dozens of Teslas MrBeast has given away. By then, an eight-person partnerships team was trying to get that stuff for free, or get paid to feature it.

Housenbold told Business Insider, "My goal is to make everything we do profitable." He also set up a team that checks whether a video makes sense on budget before it gets made.

The company renegotiated ad deals too, raising what advertisers pay to reach the same number of viewers by as much as 65%, depending on the category. TIME adds the smaller stuff, like consolidating software licenses and reusing expensive sets instead of tearing them down every time.

Housenbold told TIME the company had cut more than $100 million in operating expenses in a little over a year. Over two years, he said, revenue growth was up 50%.

That sounds like a turnaround. But there's a bigger number underneath it. He also said the company had lost $500 million over the previous five years. Their first profit was still a forecast, expected in 2026.

The cost side was getting fixed. The harder question is on the sales side, and that's where that 2026 internal deck comes in.

THE CRACK, THEN MOVE 47:40 to 9:20

In July 2026, Business Insider reported on an internal Feastables presentation. US sales volume grew 33% in 2024. In 2025, it grew 13%.

In the 12 months to March 2026, Feastables sold 8.8 million units through major retailers, barely more than in 2025. It was still growing, just a lot slower than before.

And the same deck explains why that matters. It describes a brand that relies heavily on MrBeast's promotion to drive awareness. One limited-edition item sold out almost immediately after he posted about it.

That's the known risk with creator brands. Daniel Scharff, a former analytics executive for packaged-goods makers, told Business Insider that brands like these are very good at getting people to try a product, but those people don't always come back to buy it again. The chocolate works when he's the one holding it up. What happens when he isn't?

That's move four. Point the machine at a new product. In February 2026, Beast Industries bought Step, a financial app for teens and young adults with more than 7 million users. A few weeks earlier, a blockchain company called Bitmine had invested $200 million in Beast Industries.

TIME described another bet in the works, a MrBeast phone plan with one of the big three carriers, Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T.

And money brings a different kind of attention. In March 2026, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to the company with concerns about Step's past crypto marketing to kids. That's not the kind of letter a chocolate brand gets.

PAYOFF9:20 to 10:20

Put the four moves together and the picture flips. The videos aren't where Beast Industries makes its money. They're the distribution. The chocolate, the TV show, the phone plan, the banking app, every one of them is a bet on what that audience will pay for.

Housenbold's forecast made 2026 the year that bet gets graded. So, is the machine still working? The cost cuts are real, going by the company's own numbers. Sales are the open question, because Feastables grew at less than half its old pace in 2025, and the first profit was still a forecast. Business Insider reports the company has been trying to depend less on MrBeast himself, and TIME says building channels around other creators is a priority.

If you want to know whether the empire works, watch whether anything sells when he's not the one holding it up.