MrBeast and Wall Street’s Tom Lee strike a headline-grabbing deal as BitMine commits a $200m investment into Beast Industries, fusing creator fandom with crypto finance ambitions. (Photo: Unknown) 
A R1.65-trillion ($200-million) investment was announced last week that has got to rate, at least on the surface, as one of the oddest deals I have ever seen. It was between a wild social media vlogger and a crypto investment company run by a man in a suit and tie (the deal will close on Monday, 19 January). Two more unusual bedfellows you cannot imagine — until you look really closely, and then you realise how much the world has changed.
Let’s start with the transacting parties. The company receiving the investment is Beast Industries. It could be called an entertainment company, but that doesn’t really capture it. Its creator is 27-year-old Jimmy Donaldson, known to 450 million people as “MrBeast”. Yes, 450 million. He makes videos and uploads them to YouTube. That’s it. That’s the core of his considerable empire.
He captures attention and turns that attention into money, and therein lies our tale.
Donaldson started as a kid doing what the early internet rewarded: persistence bordering on self-harm. His breakout era was basically: “What’s the dumbest thing a human can do on camera for an absurd length of time — and will the algorithm reward it?” So he did the classics. In 2017, he filmed himself counting to 100,000, a stunt he said took more than 40 hours.
He followed the same endurance logic into other “why would anyone watch this?” experiments — spinning a fidget spinner for 24 hours, reading every word in the dictionary, and other feats that felt like performance art made out of boredom, caffeine and silliness. He made videos where he repeated a celebrity’s name an insane number of times (“Saying Logan Paul 100,000 Times” sits in the canon of those early long-form marathons).
These weren’t random; they were lab experiments in human curiosity. The hook wasn’t “this is good”. The hook was “I can’t believe he’s actually doing it”. Viewers didn’t click for art; they clicked for the same reason people slow down to look at a car accident — except here the accident was a teenager voluntarily turning time into content.
And then Donaldson moved from endurance to escalation. The same “you have no choice but to watch” mechanism got repackaged into massive “last-to-leave” challenges, giant prize competitions and stunts with a moral glow — tipping strangers, paying off debts, and turning giveaways into theatre.
Over time, the giveaways became the signature, and the scale became the brand: the MrBeast worldview is basically that money is a prop you can use to manufacture emotion on demand. Beast Industries has become a multifaceted entertainment and consumer products company anchored by absurdly efficient distribution. In the deal announcement, Beast Industries touts five billion monthly downloads across its channels. It namechecks the philanthropic apparatus (Beast Philanthropy) as part of the identity rather than a side quest.
It treats the whole thing like an empire, not a channel — the kind of machine that can launch a chocolate bar, a show, a charity drive and a meme before traditional media has finished its first meeting about brand safety. So far, it is the most successful creator economy on the internet.
Now comes the weird part. The investor is Bitmine, a specialised crypto company. Its chairman, Tom Lee, comes from the button-down world of traditional investment banking, including top trading positions at JPMorgan. His company, Bitmine, has one overriding goal: to own 5% of the supply of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, ETH. The company does nothing else but buy ETH and deposit it in its treasury.
They are part of a new genre of companies called “crypto treasury companies”. If you’re wondering why an ETH-treasury company is buying into a creator empire, the short answer is this: Beast Industries has turned viewer attention into razor-sharp distribution infrastructure.
Financial services platform
In 2026, that might be the rarest asset on Earth because MrBeast isn’t just entertainment anymore; he’s an interface. And finance, increasingly, is an interface war. The press-release language is blunt about where they are headed. Tom Lee praises Beast Industries as a generational creator platform; Beast Industries CEO Jeffrey Housenbold talks about exploring ways to collaborate and incorporate DeFi into an upcoming financial services platform.
That phrase “financial services platform” is the hidden hinge in the whole story. It suggests Beast Industries isn’t merely raising money to make bigger videos; it’s building the kind of consumer-facing product where distribution is everything, and trust is oxygen.
Bitmine, for its part, has a chronic problem shared by every crypto-native business that dreams of mass adoption: onboarding. Crypto is famously terrible at introducing itself to normal people without immediately asking them to become amateur security experts. MrBeast can get a broad audience to do almost anything. He has a built-in mobilisation engine and a culture of participation.
If Beast Industries moves into consumer financial services, Bitmine’s ETH posture becomes a potential backbone: a crypto proposition in a mainstream consumer wrapper. Beast Industries is the closest thing on Earth to a consumer megaphone that comes with trust pre-installed.
It’s a strange marriage. One partner speaks in terms of tokenomics and treasury strategy; the other speaks in terms of shock, generosity and dopamine. But zoom out, and they share the same obsession: scale. MrBeast scales attention and converts it into commerce; Bitmine scales capital and converts it into crypto exposure.
Put them together and you get a 2026 idea that’s equal parts exciting and unsettling: what if the next mass-market financial interface isn’t a bank app, but a creator ecosystem? The deal is finance buying a seat inside the attention economy’s most efficient factory, betting that the next generation will learn to use financial products through content, story, and a man calmly promising he will do something ridiculous for 10 hours if you just keep watching.
Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg, a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick. His new book, It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.