Mr Beast has done the unfathomable by becoming the undisputed champion of popularity on a platform with 10s of millions of active channels. The best part is that his YouTube fame benefits many regular people through his legendary giveaways.
Today, we will go through Jimmy Donaldson’s entire YouTube career and find the biggest Mr Beast giveaways of all time. Since we will be digging through everything anyway, we can also give you the most accurate estimate of how much money Mr Beast has given away in his career. There are a lot of giveaways to go over, so let’s see where the paper trail leads us.
What was Mr Beast’s first giveaway?
Mr Beast’s first giveaway was in June 2017, and it was very different from most of his present-day money-giving content. While modern-day Beast usually gives a lot of money to the winners of challenges or games, in 2017, He gave away a comparatively lower sum to a homeless person in a video fittingly titled “Giving A Random Homeless Man $10,000.”
These no-questions-asked donations would remain the primary format for the next couple of years. They would involve giving money to more homeless people and random street folks, giving huge tips to waitresses, cab drivers, and delivery men, and Mr Beast breaking his own record for the largest Twitch donations multiple times.
Though these early giveaways are nothing to scoff at, the real money started to flow from 2019 onwards, when all of Mr Beast’s biggest donations would occur. Most of these would make their beneficiaries exponentially more financially acute and would be almost unreasonably entertaining to watch, which is why they are some of Mr Beast’s most successful videos ever.
Mr Beast’s biggest giveaways, ranked
5) Last To Take Hand Off $1 million Keeps It
As the title of this 2019 video suggests, whoever kept their hand on the $1 million stack of cash would take the money home. This final challenge was actually the fifth overall, the previous four acting as a qualification process for this grand final. At the time, this was by far Mr Beast’s biggest giveaway and, by extension, the first to crack the $1 million mark. With it being at the bottom of our top five, it’s clear that it wouldn’t be the last.
4) $1.3 million worth of chocolate
Not all giveaways are created the same. Instead of straight up giving people cash, Mr Beast decided to treat them to free chocolate. Back in 2022, the YouTuber announced that whoever orders his chocolate Feastibles using the coupon “FREE” within a 10-minute span would get the chocolate, well, free, including shipping costs.
In the aftermath of chocolate mania, Mr Beast assessed the “damages” to be worth $1.3 million, enough to crack his all-time top five giveaways. It is unorthodox, sure, but free stuff is still considered a giveaway in our book.
3) Beat Ronaldo, Win $1 Million
This time the video title is a little misleading because the Ronaldo giveaway actually amounted to $1.5 million. Okay, the Ronaldo segment itself held a $1 million prize, but there were five more chapters to this project, each awarding $100,000, bringing us to the $1.5 million total.
In this video, Mr Beast gathered up some of the best athletes in the world, such as soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and the greatest NFL player ever, Tom Brady, and pitted them against regular Joes in challenges involving the respective athlete’s sport. Shockingly, both Brady and Ronaldo got beaten by the challengers, but don’t worry, even if the superstars had won, the money would have still gone to charity.
2) I Gave My 100 Millionth Subscriber An Island
If giving out chocolates doesn’t sound impressive enough, how about an island? Mr Beast has a habit of doing something special for certain subscriber goals since the earlier days of his YouTube success, but the scale of his 100 million subscribers celebration video went beyond anything that came before.
Mr Beast gave 100 of his 100 million subscribers the chance to win a private island estimated to be worth around 2 million dollars. The participants took part in several rounds of challenges that dwindled their numbers down to just five contestants. The final challenge was finding Mr Beast’s special 100 million subscribers YouTube play button, hidden in a briefcase somewhere on the island. More importantly for the winning contestant, that briefcase also contained the deed for their new island.
1) Beast Games
Mr Beast has been known for large giveaways for years, but his latest endeavor took the concept to new levels. The ongoing Beast Games that was created in association with Amazon Prime will net the winner a staggering $5 million, with many smaller prizes given out to contestants who came up short of the big prize, including another private island, which would have made this list all by itself.
Beast Games takes the classic formula to the extreme, with 10 full episodes of challengers going through trials and tribulations to win $5 million. The production is so much bigger than anything Mr Beast had done before; you cannot actually watch the full series on YouTube, the platform synonymous with Mr Beast. Beast Games is an Amazon Prime exclusive. You can still get a small taste via the pilot episode called “2,000 People Fight For $5 Million.”
How much money has Mr Beast given away in his career?
Mr Beast’s first giveaway happened in 2017. Since then, he has done dozens more – some larger than others, some being straight-up donations, and others involving some kind of challenge, some delivered in cash, others coming in the form of an object that could be a chocolate bar or a private island. All of these variables make calculating the exact amount of money given away by Mr Beast tricky, but we’ve done enough digging and math to confidently give you an estimate.
According to our calculations, as of 2025, Mr Beast has given away around $27 million in his career. These figures do not include charity campaigns, such as his series of videos helping deaf and blind people or his tree-planting project. The $27 million figure comes strictly from donations and challenges.
Year | Biggest Giveaway | Total Amount |
2017 | Multiple $10,000 giveaways | $50,000 |
2018 | Multiple $100,000 Giveaways | $1 million |
2019 | $200,000 YouTuber Battle Royale | $1.5 million |
2020 | Giving $1 million In Food To People In Need | $3 million |
2021 | Extreme $1 Million Hide And Seek | $3.5 million |
2022 | I Gave My 100 Millionth Subscriber An Island – $2 million | $4 million |
2023 | Ages 1-100 Fight For $500,000 | $1.5 million |
2024 | Beat Ronaldo, Win $1 million – $1.5 million | $6.5 million |
2025 | Beast Games – $5-7 million | $5-7 million |
All Time | Beast Games – $5-7 million | $26-28 million |
Breaking these numbers down by year gives us a better idea of how much growth Jimmy Donaldson has experienced since starting out on YouTube more than a decade ago. His first year of donations, 2017, barely cracked the $50,000 mark. It’s still a lot, don’t get us wrong, but it’s a cool 20 times less than what Mr Beast would give away in the following 12 months.
Mr Beast giveaways would keep getting bigger and bigger, with each year building on the previous, up until 2023. That year saw the YouTuber dial down significantly. With only six giveaways, two of which were small $10,000 donations, the yearly total hovered around $1.5 million, the lowest figure since 2019.
Mr Beast returned in full force in 2024 and broke his record by delivering giveaways amounting to $6.5 million. This record is unlikely to stand for long, considering Beast Games will probably crack that milestone by itself, so even as early as February 2025 is shaping up to be a remarkable year for Mr Beast giveaways.
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