It looks like MrBeast is playing ball with Elon Musk after all.
Earlier this week, Jimmy Donaldson — better known as MrBeast, one of YouTube’s most popular personalities — posted a 16-minute video on X called “$1 Car vs $100,000,000 Car!”
“I’m curious how much ad revenue a video on X would make so I’m reuploading this to test it,” Donaldson said in the post, adding that he’d share the figures next week.
Donaldson uploaded the same car video on YouTube three months ago and it’s accumulated over 211 million views. As of Tuesday, Donaldson’s video on X had 42.3 million views.
His video post comes after Donaldson and Musk had an exchange in December that kicked off a debate about whether creators are indeed welcome on X. When Musk encouraged the YouTuber to upload a video to X, Donaldson replied: “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!”
Musk has been talking about X taking on YouTube and Twitch for months, but now industry sources have told Cord Cutters News that the tech mogul has approached some popular YouTubers, like MrBeast, to post their videos on X. The Tesla owner has talked about creating more financial incentives to make it worth it for creators to post on his platform.
MrBeast has 231 million subscribers on YouTube and 25.3 million followers on X. If more creators take part in these tests and begin cross-posting — maybe even migrating exclusively — to X, a serious shakeup could be coming for video-sharing and live streaming apps.
MrBeast’s video isn’t the first step X has taken to make room for content creators.
In December, Streamlabs — a popular live streaming software for content creators — added support on the social media platform. The software’s cross-platform capabilities make live streaming on X easier.
When Twitter merged into X Corp. in April, Musk voiced plans to turn the social media platform into an “everything app.” So far, ideas for the one-stop-shop app include dating, job-hunting, banking, audio and video calls, live streaming, and more.
X wasn’t immediately available for comment.
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