The quickest path to owning a private island runs through MrBeast’s NC hometown

Hunched over logs on a Caribbean beach, Mallory Devine feverishly struck a stone against a flint rock. Starting a prehistoric fire wasn’t a skill she had honed growing up in suburban New Jersey, but the 22-year-old restaurant server and recent East Carolina University graduate wouldn’t entertain the thought of appearing in a MrBeast video and losing.

The day before, she had been flown from Raleigh to the Bahamas for a mystery event, a set of challenges dreamed up by the world’s most successful YouTuber. Devine was one of 100 contestants, each given a pink T-shirt for the day of filming. Minutes before the competition began, they were told the stakes: A private island was visible across a small stretch of teal water. One of them would soon own it.

Igniting a torch was the first of four tasks. Next came a game of red light-green light, inspired by the hit Netflix show “Squid Game,” a survivalist commentary on modern economic inequality. Devine survived that round, too.

Then a twist, because untold hours spent analyzing online audience habits had showed MrBeast the value of a well-timed surprise: A contestant was told to randomly disqualify half of the competitors. Again, Devine advanced. She made it to the last 10. Then final five.

Standing on the Bahamian island she sensed would be hers, Devine and the four remaining contestants were instructed to find a hidden case. After about 45 minutes of searching, Devine came upon a palm branch that appeared to have fallen inorganically. She dug, spotted the case labeled “Contract of Sale,” and clutched it until it felt real.

“I was hugging onto it for dear life,” she said.

At the time, Devine had $20 in her bank account and six figures in student debt. She suddenly possessed a deed to Caribbean real estate, a 12-acre island called Ben’s Cay about 70 miles from Cuba.

“I can appreciate that I think I’ve already had the best moment of my entire life,” she says today.

Released in the summer of 2022, the video titled “I Gave My 100,000,000th Subscriber an Island” currently has more than 202 million views on YouTube, an unimaginable tally for all but a few online creators. It ranks as MrBeast’s 46th most-watched video.

MrBeast is the alias of Jimmy Donaldson, an apple-cheeked 25-year-old in Greenville, North Carolina, who is also the most popular YouTuber ever. His channel now has 244 million subscribers, second in the world behind an Indian music label, and the gap is narrowing.

Last year, Time magazine named Donaldson one of the world’s 100 most influential people, while Forbes estimated his annual earnings in 2023 to be around $54 million. This NBA season, Donaldson’s food brand Feastables is the jersey sponsor of the Charlotte Hornets. His new filming complex in North Greenville sits alongside major manufacturing and pharmaceutical sites in the Eastern North Carolina city.

All this should come as a surprise, he says.

“In the middle of North Carolina, in a small town, I had like horrible acne. Especially back then. Really awkward,” he told podcaster Joe Rogan in 2022. “People would have bet a million dollars that I wouldn’t be a YouTuber, you know what I mean? It makes no sense.”

Many in Greenville are still making sense of it, too.

Tipping $10,000, counting to 100,000

Donaldson first went viral in early 2017 when, as a teenager, he sat at his bedroom computer and methodically counted to 100,000 over the course of 40 hours. Chronicling feats of singular discomfort is a particular type of MrBeast video. He’s spent 50 hours buried in a coffin-sized case. Then a full week. Another seven days stranded on an ocean raft with his crew of mostly fellow 20-something guys. In 2019, they made 1,000 uninterrupted trips around a Ferris wheel.

Other stunts showcase novel philanthropy. In a video posted last year, Donaldson paid for the cataract surgeries of 1,000 blind people. And zanier ideas involve pyrotechnics. Greenville’s fire marshal told The News & Observer his department has issued public noise advisories to alert local residents. Resident Maria Satira remembered a time four luxury sports cars zoomed past her on Greenville Boulevard.

“Our community is not that flashy,” she said. “If it’s something you wouldn’t see on a typical day, it’s a good chance it might be MrBeast.”

The most consistent MrBeast video trait is the inventive gifting of money and prizes. He’s tipped a waitress $10,000. Dropped $20,000 from a drone. Awarded pizza deliverers a new car, an entire house. Handed out iPhones for Halloween.

For his first giveaway stunt, Donaldson convinced a sponsor to give him $10,000, which he handed to a local homeless man.

Donaldson’s crew once went through Greenville putting money on trees. In 2020, they raced around downtown Raleigh trying to gift free vehicles to incredulous passersby. At the end of that video, MrBeast picked up an Uber customer in a yellow Lamborghini and handed him the keys.

On YouTube, the edited stunts tend to crescendo at moments when the unsuspecting participants realize their randomly gotten riches. They grasp their faces, cry, call parents and hug whoever is nearby.

As Donaldson’s profile and view counts have ascended, so has the scale of his acts. Ten grand giveaways became $50,000, $100,000, a million dollars. Fewer stunts unfold in public: On-the-street gimmicks have been swapped for high-budget experiences contained within professionally constructed, dream-like sets. In one recent video, a man spent 45 days living in a fully-stocked supermarket, earning $10,000 a day.

“For the last eight or nine years, like every dollar I made I just spent it the next month on content,” he said in 2023, during a podcast on the creator economy. “I just did that every month and it kept getting bigger and bigger.”

A few years ago, the MrBeast team had approached Greenville bookstore owner David Brown about doing a stunt where they would hide a check in one of his books and allow contestants to search. Brown declined, given the risk it posed to his inventory. Today, Donaldson could build his own bookstore.

The Sup Dogs connection

Vying for cash, cars, computers and sometimes private islands has become a somewhat common perk for Greenville’s service workers.

Devine, who won the island, was working at Sup Dogs, a popular downtown Greenville bar and restaurant, when she met a former cook who had joined MrBeast’s staff. After a virtual interview and 10 days quarantining in a Raleigh hotel, she was on her way to the Caribbean.

Her boss didn’t need much explanation. Sup Dogs owner Bret Oliverio estimates a hundred or so employees have appeared in MrBeast videos over the past seven years — with at least a dozen winning.

“A lot of (MrBeast’s) staff and casting directors are always in our restaurant,” he said. “Talking to our staff, inside and outside of work, they’re like, ‘Hey, do you know anyone who can be at this park at 2 p.m. tomorrow? We can’t really tell you what for.’ A lot of our staff are young and they say, ‘Sure.’”

For one video, Sup Dogs server Natalie Broder jammed $25,000 worth of rings on her finger and got to keep the money value. She paid off some of her student debt and bought an espresso machine. In 2021, former Sup Dogs employee Jordan Santos won $10,000 by finishing second in a $100,000 “extreme” game of tag held within an abandoned hospital.

“Many of us are students, or the serving industry is our full-time job,” Broder said. “We have that flexibility to take off work for a video, because sometimes it’s shooting on a Sunday, sometimes it’s a Tuesday, and sometimes it’s for four days in a row.”

Sup Dogs employees aren’t the only Greenville workers who’ve benefited from sharing a city with Donaldson. A server at the local China 10 restaurant won a car, and Adam Lorjuste, the general manager at Jack Brown’s Beer & Burger, has been featured in enough videos to warrant an entry on a MrBeast fandom site.

MrBeast, the business

Throughout Donaldson’s rise, a constant has been his hometown.

Historically known for tobacco and agriculture, Greenville is a college town of 89,000 with an economy supplemented by pharmaceuticals and heavy manufacturing. After East Carolina University and its affiliated hospital, its top three employers are Thermo Fischer, the forklift maker Hyster-Yale and Catalent.

And now there’s MrBeast enterprises. Donaldson moved to the city as a child and attended Greenville Christian Academy, where he played basketball and baseball. But the way Donaldson tells it, he pursued YouTube as a daily obsession.

After graduation, he ostensibly spent a few weeks at a local community college but cops to making videos in the campus parking lot instead. Some have reported Donaldson briefly attended East Carolina University but the school has no record of him enrolling.

Today, his $14 million studio-slash-offices are north of downtown, directly across the street from the drug manufacturer Catalent. The facility includes a 50,000-square-foot main room called Studio C with high, sound-proof ceilings and room for elaborate sets and wide filming angles.

The building was purchased under the name Creative Grid, county property records show. On a recent weekday, the field outside contained props for past or future MrBeast videos: two large ramps, a pair of watchtowers and a makeshift building with a simple sign that read “Bank” above its door. Property records also reveal Creative Grid bought close to 100 additional acres around the studio last year.

Like forklifts and pharmaceuticals, YouTube is creating local jobs. Unlike these traditional industries, it’s putting the city on the map with a younger, more online demographic, says Josh Lewis, president and CEO of the Greenville Eastern North Carolina Alliance.

“I would say (all cities) would love to have the visibility he could bring,” he said. “You’re adding some diversity to an economy that is constantly in transition in the last 10 years.”

A boon to Greenville’s economy

East Carolina University is partnering with Donaldson to launch a training program for the growing online creator industry, which Goldman Sachs predicts might reach $480 billion within the next four years.

MrBeast representatives did not respond to questions for this story, but Lewis estimated the company has more than a hundred full-time workers, plus a constant flow of local construction and video contractors. Flying contestants into the Eastern North Carolina city to film stunts is another boon to the economy, he said.

MrBeast, the business, currently posts 11 job openings, all based in Greenville. Some positions come with temporary housing; since 2019, Donaldson has purchased five single-family homes in a quiet neighborhood south of downtown, Pitt County property tax documents show. The houses were bought through an entity registered by MrBeast lawyer Kevin Sayed, with the sale prices ranging from $250,000 to $680,000.

Those who share a street with the YouTubers say they haven’t caused any havoc. “It’s not like there are a bunch of parties,” neighbor Raymond Neelon said. Another former neighbor only noted they played a lot of basketball.

Geography matters less in the YouTube industry, allowing Donaldson to eschew major cities for the one he knows best.

“Boy, you’re going to just relocate all your employees to LA and buy a studio space there that will cost 10 times more?” Donaldson has said. “Like why?”

Jordan Santos, who also moved to Greenville as a child, suspects staying in the city serves as a kind of dedication test for prospective MrBeast employees. Many might move to New York or Los Angeles for a job. Only the driven will uproot to Eastern North Carolina.

Donaldson himself presents as very driven. He started making content with childhood friend Kris Tyson as a young teenager and later broadened the crew with fellow online content devotees he met in Greenville and online. In the early years, Donaldson says they each swore off drugs, drinking, and dating — instead filling days with marathon planning and filming sessions. Many past and present crew members — Karl, Kris, Candler, Tareq, Jake the Viking — have their own followings.

“If there’s a 12-year-old kid in town for a softball tournament and sees Karl (Jacobs) in the restaurant, they’re gonna lose their mind,” Oliverio, the Sup Dogs owner, said.

A Time magazine feature noted that Donaldson films for 15 hours a day, 20 to 25 days a month. He keeps an apartment at his North Greenville facility, saving a commute. And he now has a girlfriend, whom he credited in the Time story with helping him work harder.

So, what’d she do with the island?

Donaldson has spoken at length about his obsession with mastering the science of YouTube, pinpointing the best combinations of quick cuts and plot sequencing to engage and retain audiences. He described being hooked on the video platform, which launched in 2005, after his very first video (which explained a hack in a niche video game) attracted 20,000 views.

Thumbnail images are important. MrBeast’s invariably feature his face — typically grinning or in anguish — overlaid on a cartoon depiction of the stunt. Donaldson has called the opening five to 10 seconds of any video essential, and his video titles always seem to contain many zeros. Nothing is “$50 million.” It’s always “$50,000,000.”

YouTube metrics, he’s said, show his core demographic to be between ages 18 and 25. But his content appeals broadly, Oliverio said.

“I’m 42 and my daughter is 6, and we were both equally as entertained,” he said. “And that is almost impossible for anybody to do with any TV show, movie or podcast.”

Among MrBeast’s first 100 million subscribers, Mallory Devine discovered the YouTuber through her two younger sisters, who pressed Devine to watch when she transferred to ECU.

Then Devine took a server job at Sup Dogs. Then she won a private island.

Devine never worked at Sup Dogs again. She says this was less due to island ownership and more because she had graduated and planned to move back to New Jersey.

Having millions watch her win an island gave her a flash of celebrity. Her TikTok account added a few thousand followers. She did a podcast. Last summer, she was recognized by two preteens at the Newark airport.

“What was so crazy is that it had been like a year since,” she said.

Answering the questions she gets asked most about the experience, Devine says nothing about the video was scripted and Donaldson seemed very nice.

And how about the third common question? What did she do with the island?

A few hours after gripping the deed, Devine left the island and never returned. The land had some amenities — there was a helipad, a pool, a fire pit and a cabana-like shelter — but it wasn’t a ready-to-go rental property. And keeping the island for even a year was a luxury (and tax burden) she couldn’t afford.

Working at Sup Dogs, Devine reserved most of her paycheck for school, groceries and rent. So after talking to another potential buyer who had visions of converting the island into a mini resort, she decided to take a cash prize from MrBeast for the value of the land.

Devine declines to disclose the amount, but described it as life changing. She paid off all her debt and started a scholarship at her high school.

As for the island itself, Ben’s Cay is currently listed on realty sites for $850,000. Devine understands the land reverted to its original owner, who had the deed before MrBeast and the competition. It makes sense MrBeast wouldn’t hold the island after it served its purpose.

It had created viral content, and there are always more islands out there to give away.

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