Beast Industries, founded by the most followed YouTuber in the world Mr. Beast, has recently acquired Step, a financial services app for teenagers and young adults that has over seven million users.
Jimmy Donaldson is the most followed YouTuber in the world with over 469 million subscribers, but you probably know him as Mr. Beast. The internet celebrity is most well known for posting extreme and eccentric stunts and challenges that are also charitable and normally involve giving away literal giant piles of money.
Now, Mr. Beast has acquired Step through his company Beast Industries. Step is a financial services app for teenagers and young adults that has over seven million users.
Chief executive of Beast Industries, Jeffrey Housenbold, calls Mr. Beast the most popular guy in the world with around 1.4 billion people watching his content around the world. Beyond just YouTube, Donaldson runs a reality contest on Amazon Prime Video and has his own chocolate bars, burgers, a mobile phone service, as well as a thriller with James Patterson.
His latest venture into banking shows just how far he wants to expand his empire. The Step app offers spending, savings, and investment accounts with parental supervision options for users under the age of 18. It also offers a secured card for deposits like a debit card, with a larger goal of helping young people build their credit standing before they enter adulthood.
The controversy lies within the relationship Mr. Beast and Household have to do with investing and finances in relation to what young impressionable minds could do now with the app and the celebrity’s influence.
However, the two figures think that their presence in the company will help educate younger people on their finances and philanthropy, something that Mr. Beast said he never had growing up, according to the New York Times.
“Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up. That’s exactly why we’re joining forces with Step! I want to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had.”
In an interview with creator Jon Youshaei, Mr. Beast said that he had been “awakened” to the power of investing as a teenager while he was watching a gamer play Call of Duty on YouTube.
“It blew my brain. I wasn’t even watching him to learn about finances,” the 27-year-old said.
This is also not the first time Mr. Beast has expressed his interest in educating his following on finances. He spoke publicly about wanting to create a YouTube channel just for personal finance content, which he still may pursue. He would use the account to talk about Roth individual retirement accounts and do for his younger followers what the gamer he was watching did for him, NYT reports.
Mr. Beast is also very publicly interested in cryptocurrency and other related investment opportunities. “Jimmy would be the first to admit this is why financial literacy is so important, especially for proud-talking young founders like himself,” Housenbold said.
Donaldson’s trading in the past has been controversial, however, within crypto spaces, and he currently has a majority of his net worth in his company. Recently, he even revealed that he was going to need to borrow money from his mom to pay for his wedding, making many followers skeptical over his future in the financial world.
Housenbold said that with Step, Beast Industries can spend less on acquiring customers than its competitors, as they will be able to pass on those savings to customers in the form of a lower interest rate on loans or a higher rate on savings which still turns a profit, wrote NYT.
“The reach is unprecedented. We know how to gamify things. We know how to make things viral. We know how to connect with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.”
While Mr. Beast is extremely popular and widely admired by his millions of subscribers and fans for his philanthropy, he’s faced a multitude of criticism throughout his career as well.
Over a dozen contestants who participated in “Beast Games,” his reality competition show that holds a grand prize of $5 million, have stated they never received adequate food or medical care, NYT reports.
He’s also been called out for using slurs and other offensive terms. One of his employees was recently fined and suspended from Kalshi, a prediction-market platform, for allegedly making near-perfect bets using nonpublic information related to the television show they worked on.
Hosenbold stated that the company was committed to doing the right thing when it comes to their acquisition of the financial app for young people.
“You could do great while doing great, our company has taken on extra costs to ethically source its chocolate, Feastables. It’s endemic to our brand,” he said.
Parents and financial experts have their concerns and complaints over Mr. Beast’s massive influence is now entering into the sphere of money planning, especially on young impressionable minds who already have a bias towards the YouTube celebrity.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
