MrBeast Hit 500 Million Subscribers. He's Also Been in a Lawsuit Over How He Got There.

Jimmy Donaldson livestreamed the moment his YouTube channel crossed 500 million subscribers on June 12, 2026 — more than 600,000 people watched it happen live, according to Philstar’s report on the event, and YouTube’s own blog confirms he’s the first individual creator ever to reach the number. The same two years that took him there also produced a still-unresolved class-action lawsuit over how one of his biggest projects got made, and his own on-record admission that the deal behind it cost him tens of millions of dollars. Both are real, both are sourced, and neither cancels the other out.

From counting to a million to the biggest channel on the platform

Donaldson started uploading to YouTube in February 2012 at age 13, according to Wikipedia’s sourced account of his career, and spent years studying the platform’s algorithm before his content broke through. He surpassed India’s T-Series to become YouTube’s most-subscribed channel overall on June 2, 2024 — a milestone widely reported at the time, since T-Series’ catalog-driven, multi-decade Bollywood output had made it look permanently ahead of any single creator. Two years later, per YouTube’s official blog, he’d more than doubled that lead: 500 million subscribers, a customized “500M Play Button” presented by YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, and a channel that had already banked over $25 million for the #TeamTrees campaign, over $30 million for #TeamSeas, and $40 million in 2025 for #TeamWater — YouTube’s own numbers, not press-release rounding.

The $100 million deal, and what he says it actually cost him

In March 2024, Donaldson struck a reported $100 million deal with Amazon Prime Video for a competition series called Beast Games, pitting up to 1,000 contestants against each other for what was billed as the largest single cash prize in television history. It premiered December 19, 2024, and Amazon renewed it for two more seasons by May 12, 2025, according to Wikipedia’s sourced production history.

Donaldson has since said, on the record, that the deal didn’t pay off for him personally. In an appearance on the podcast The Diary of a CEO, later reported by Fortune’s Preston Fore on March 30, 2025, he said: “It was not a good financial decision to make Beast Games. I lost money. I would have more money if I didn’t film it.” Fortune’s report put the production spend at more than $100 million against tens of millions of dollars in losses, including roughly $22 million in contestant giveaways on top of set-construction costs — and quoted Donaldson calling himself “an idiot” for the overrun while saying he doesn’t regret it, because “I can’t let the YouTube community down.”

A lawsuit that started before the show even aired

Before Beast Games premiered, five contestants filed a class-action lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on September 16, 2024, against Donaldson’s production company (named in filings as MRB2024 LLC) and Amazon Alternative LLC, Amazon’s unscripted-production arm. Variety’s Todd Spangler reported the filing on September 18, 2024: the suit alleged failure to pay minimum wage and overtime, inadequate meals and rest breaks, unsafe conditions that led to hospitalizations, and sexual harassment, with one contestant quoted saying “it absolutely felt like a hostile environment for us.” Fortune and the trade outlet Kidscreen both covered the same filing within days, with matching detail on the defendants and allegations. Neither Donaldson’s team nor Amazon provided a comment to Variety at the time, and we found no later, comparably sourced reporting confirming a settlement or dismissal — so as far as verifiable reporting shows, the claims were contested, not resolved.

Deepfakes wearing his face — the fraud problem that’s actually in our lane

Donaldson has also spent real time fighting a different kind of authenticity problem: people impersonating him with AI. In October 2023, a deepfaked video of his face and voice circulated as a TikTok ad for a fake iPhone giveaway, promising 10,000 iPhones for $2 each. Fortune, TechCrunch, and the creator-industry outlet Tubefilter all reported on the ad within days of each other; Donaldson publicly called it “a serious problem” and warned fans directly that it wasn’t him. TikTok removed the ad, per Tubefilter’s report, after it was flagged as a policy violation. It’s the exact fraud pattern our own guide on spotting a deepfake or AI-generated influencer endorsement walks through — except here the target of the impersonation was the world’s biggest YouTuber, not a smaller creator with less capacity to push back.

What our checker would add — and why we didn’t run it

MrBeast’s channel is on YouTube, one of the two platforms — alongside Twitch — that our free authenticity checker scores with live data rather than a modeled estimate. We didn’t run that check for this piece, and nothing here states or implies a numeric authenticity score for his account. A creator with 500 million verified subscribers, an official YouTube milestone post, and multiple mainstream outlets confirming the same production and legal history doesn’t need a synthetic score to establish the account is real. If you want a live read anyway, you can run it yourself at /check/youtube/mrbeast.

The bottom line

The largest channel in YouTube’s history and an unresolved lawsuit over how one of its biggest bets got made are both true about the same two-year stretch, sourced to different outlets that don’t depend on each other. Reporting the milestone without the lawsuit — or the lawsuit without the milestone — would each tell only half of a story that’s fully checkable either way.

Sources: Wikipedia, “MrBeast”; YouTube Official Blog, “MrBeast: 500 Million YouTube Subscribers”; Philstar, “MrBeast 1st YouTuber to hit 500 million subscribers” (Kristofer Purnell, June 16, 2026); Fortune, “MrBeast lost millions on Beast Games…” (Preston Fore, March 30, 2025); Variety, “MrBeast, Amazon Sued by Contestants on ‘Beast Games’…” (Todd Spangler, September 18, 2024); Kidscreen, “Beast Games contestants launch lawsuit against MrBeast, Amazon”; Fortune, “MrBeast lawsuit: participants…” (September 19, 2024); Tubefilter, “MrBeast calls out TikTok for allowing deepfake ad” (October 4, 2023); Fortune, “MrBeast, Jimmy Donaldson, Tom Hanks subject to AI scams, false advertising, deepfakes” (October 4, 2023).