MrBeast Says He’s Quitting YouTube To Post Full-Time On X, Elon Musk Reacts

MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, is the biggest YouTuber in the world. He has more than 248 million subscribers, which makes him the most subscribed individual YouTuber, and the second most-subscribed channel overall. Yesterday, Donaldson posted on X, “I’m quitting YouTube.” This announcement would have come as a surprise to anyone who would see the continuing popularity of MrBeast videos. However, since it was posted on April 1, people rightly assumed that the post was an April Fool’s prank. Donaldson’s post nonetheless got over 16.5 million views and prompted thousands of comments.

When an X user asked Donaldson why he was quitting YouTube, the 25-year-old jokingly wrote, “Posting to X full time now.” This comment got over 26,000 likes. It also prompted Elon Musk, the owner and CTO of X, to respond to Donaldson. Musk asked Donaldson to seriously consider quitting YouTube and said, “You should actually.”

This is not the first time that Musk has asked Donaldson to post his videos directly on X. Back in December, Musk and Donaldson got into a conversation about posting directly on X so that MrBeast could reap the rewards of X’s new program of rewarding high-performing posts from verified X accounts. Initially, Donaldson rejected this idea and argued, “My videos cost millions to make and even if they got a billion views on X it wouldn’t fund a fraction of it I’m down though to test stuff once monetization is really cranking!”

On January 16, Donaldson posted one of his videos, “$1 Car vs $100,000,000 Car”, on X. He said that he shared the video directly on the microblogging site to check its ad revenue model. Donaldson also promised to share the ad revenue details publicly.

A week later on January 22, he shared the ad venue insights and wrote, “MY FIRST X VIDEO MADE OVER $250,000! But it’s a bit of a facade. Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience.”

As per the insights mentioned by Donalsdon he made 263,655 dollars (approximately Rs 2,19,75,855) after his video got over one hundred fifty-six million impressions and five million engagements. With this, it appeared that MrBeast dropped his plans of posting exclusively on X.