Top YouTuber MrBig has an $85 million empire, says others wouldn't want his life: 'Don’t have free will'

Jimmy Donaldson said that he had to reframe his mental approach to daily life to cope with the stress otherwise he would have fallen into depression.

The world's top YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, better known as “MrBeast,” has 370 million subscribers and runs an $85 million entertainment empire. But despite his success, the millionaire entrepreneur says that an average person would not want to live his life because of the grid.

“The average person does not want to live the life I live, or be in my head,” Donaldson told Steven Bartlett in his podcast, The Diary of a CEO. “They would be miserable because they’re just working all the time.”

Donaldson has his fingers in a lot of pies. Apart from being YouTube’s top content creator with his elaborate game show-style videos that gather more than 764 million views each, he also owns a chocolate business, a Lunchables-esque packaged food product, a virtual restaurant that only allows for pick-up and drop-off, and a production company that helps produce his viral videos, Fortune reported. Moreover,  according to a Bloomberg report, MrBeast is looking to raise a couple hundred million dollars to expand his business in a funding round that would value his company at about $5 billion.

Managing all his businesses leaves Donaldson with almost no free time. In fact, so far in 2025, he has been more unhappy than happy, he said.

“Obviously I’m not a robot. There are times when I’m like, ‘F**k, I really want to play this strategy board game or I want to do this thing, then I look at the schedule and think, ‘Ah, maybe I could do that in four days,’” he said on the podcast. “It’s very easy to go in moments like that, ‘F**k, I feel like a zoo animal, I don’t have free will, I’m like a little robot to my businesses. So you have to be very careful—sometimes those emotions take over.”

Donaldson said that he had to reframe his mental approach to daily life to cope with the stress otherwise he would have fallen into depression.

“You gotta control your thoughts, and [think], ‘Well, this is the life I chose. You want success, you want to change the world? This is the price you have to pay,’” he said. “You should actually see this as a good thing…You’re lucky it’s hard, push through it and you’ll be happy you did.”