Jimmy Donaldson was 15 years old, down to 139 pounds, and barely able to get out of bed when Crohn’s disease ended his baseball career and handed him an unexpected fork in the road. For a painfully shy kid from a small town in North Carolina, raised by a single mom who worked military hours and had no idea her son was filming videos in his bedroom, that illness became the catalyst for one of the most unusual philanthropic careers the internet has ever produced. The story of how he got there is less a tale of overnight success than a slow, obsessive accumulation of years no one saw.
Years of scraps before the first real dollar
Jimmy started posting to YouTube around age 12, drawn in after watching a creator named Woody’s Gamer Tech quit his job to make videos full-time. The revelation was simple: you could actually get paid for this. He created his username from an Xbox-generated gamer tag and began making commentary videos, analysis of how much money other creators earned, and whatever else he could film on a hand-me-down laptop his brother had received as a Christmas gift. His mom, walking past his room and hearing him talk, assumed he was gaming with friends. She told him once that he really should stop hanging out with whoever was making all that noise. He told her he would.
It took 75,000 views to earn his first hundred dollars. For a long stretch he was making around thirty dollars a month. Equipment came in stages, each saved for over months: a microphone so recordings would stop hurting listeners’ ears, a tablet, eventually a computer that could actually finish an edit without crashing. A used iPhone, when he finally got one, changed the quality of what he could produce. His oldest friend Chris, who had been his first-ever subscriber, started appearing in the videos regularly. The chemistry between them pushed things forward in a way pure grind alone had not.
The actual turning point was a counting video. Sitting in his apartment after dropping out of college, the same month he had started making just enough to move out and pay the $720-a-month rent, he counted out loud to 100,000. Forty hours. No one on the platform had done anything quite that deliberately pointless, and that was the point. ‘If I do interesting things, people will watch,’ he realized. The Bee Movie script followed. Then the dictionary. Then a fidget spinner spun for 24 hours that broke a world record. Each video was harder to ignore precisely because it was so committed.
The code he thought he cracked
His first brand deal arrived as a phone call from a company called Quid offering $5,000. He turned it down and asked for $10,000, standing in his driveway. Then he took the money, put it in an envelope, found a man experiencing homelessness outside a Walmart, handed it over on camera, and went to dinner with him afterward to hear what it would actually change. The man’s reaction, the specificity of what $10,000 meant to a specific human life, rewired something. He took the money that video earned and gave it away in the next one. Pizza delivery drivers received tips that made some of them return to his door the following day, emotional, to explain that they had taken the rest of their shift off and spent the day with their kids. ‘I kind of want to do this more,’ he said afterward.
The logic he landed on was structural: give money away in the video, the video performs well, that revenue funds giving money away in the next video. A self-sustaining cycle. As he put it plainly: ‘I think I just cracked the code.’
His mother received a $100,000 check toward her house. He arrived with his friends, tried to hand it over, and she initially said no.
20 million trees and the month that proved the internet could act
By 2019, with tens of millions of subscribers, he threw out a tweet: to celebrate hitting 20 million subscribers, he wanted to plant 20 million trees. He connected with Mark Rober, a former NASA and Apple engineer who had moved into creating content, and together they worked out that $1 could plant one tree through the Arbor Day Foundation, which had already planted hundreds of millions of trees globally. They called the campaign Team Trees, launched it on October 25th, 2019, and gave themselves roughly two months to raise $20 million.
Hundreds of creators made their own content to support it. The median donation turned out to be around $4. Elon Musk eventually donated a million dollars to claim the top leaderboard spot. The goal was hit in a single month.
A free restaurant two miles long
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with layoffs spreading across Eastern North Carolina, he partnered with Smithfield to donate 2 million meals to the region, gave away a quarter of a million dollars over Zoom to people who had lost jobs, and eventually opened a free restaurant for a day. The line backed up traffic. A police officer checked in repeatedly: first reporting a mile, then two miles, then what felt like 20 miles of cars. Cash was thrown into windows to keep the line moving. Video game consoles went to kids. Food went to anyone who showed up.
Afterward, he launched a separate channel, Beast Philanthropy, with a structure unlike anything he had run before: 100 percent of ad revenue, brand deals, and merchandise sales from that channel goes directly toward operating a food bank, with plans to scale food banks across the United States.
The warehouse in Eastern North Carolina
The food bank warehouse holds more than 50,000 pounds of food, running weekly deliveries to communities in need.
The shelves are stacked floor to ceiling.
Jimmy has said that in a perfect world, when he is around 50, he will have enough accumulated to open a few thousand homeless shelters or food banks. He is not sure yet exactly what form it takes. What he is sure about, and has repeated in essentially the same words since he was handing envelopes to strangers outside a Walmart, is that helping people is what makes him happy. Seeing someone go from a rough day to a stunned, disbelieving face: for him, nothing has ever been more entertaining than that.
