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MrBeast's secret $1 billion property empire revealed - realestate.com.au

MrBeast's secret $1 billion property empire revealed - realestate.com.au

Mercury06-06-2025
MrBeast's secret $1b empire revealed. Picture: mrbeast/Instagram
MrBeast revealed he's borrowing money from his mum to pay for his upcoming wedding to Thea Booysen despite his billionaire status and owning a slew of properties.
According to Page Six, the YouTuber, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, responded via X after a fan post described him as 'the only billionaire under 30 to not have inherited his wealth.'
'I personally have very little money because I reinvest everything (I think this year we'll spend around a quarter of a billion on content),' he wrote.
'Ironically I'm actually borrowing $ from my mom [sic] to pay for my upcoming wedding lol,' Donaldson, 27, continued.
'But sure, on paper the businesses I own are worth a lot.'
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'I turned my side hustle into $3m fortune'
MrBeast admitted he's borrowing money from his mom to pay for his wedding to Thea Booysen despite being a billionaire. Picture: mrbeast/Instagram
The YouTuber, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, responded via X after a fan post described him as 'the only billionaire under 30 to not have inherited his wealth.' Picture: mrbeast/Instagram
The content creator — who has more than 400 million subscribers — rose to fame on YouTube by sharing over-the-top stunts and challenges.
He has also garnered popularity with his fan giveaways, offering up luxurious gifts like cars.
Donaldson expanded his fanbase when he released Season 1 of 'Beast Games' on Prime Video in December 2024.
During the competition series, one out of 1,000 participants took home $US10 million.
The show, which garnered 50 million views within 25 days of its release, has already been renewed for two more seasons, per Variety.
Donaldson also owns Feastables chocolate and snack brand, as well as the MrBeast Lab toy line.
'I personally have very little money because I reinvest everything (I think this year we'll spend around a quarter of a billion on content),' he wrote. Picture: mrbeast/Instagram
The entrepreneur is believed to be the first ever YouTube billionaire, earning around $US250,000 (A$385,630) a day or $US83 million a year.
Despite being worth an estimated $US1 billion ($A1.5 billion), Donaldson lives in a no-bedroom studio apartment and doubles as his office in his hometown of Greenville, North Carolina.
The bed is located in the corner of the living room with a couch, a TV, and a coffee table. Other areas in the home include a bathroom and a closet.
The humble property features a gallery of awards from YouTube and framed photos of Apple founder Steve Jobs adorning the walls.
Donaldson lives in a no-bedroom studio apartment.
The bed is located in the corner of the living room.
Donaldson previously spoke about his decision to live a frugal lifestyle on the TMG podcast.
'I think one of the traps of modern humans is just living a materialistic life and just chasing s**t non-stop. For what? Why does it matter?,' he said.
'We just chase bigger and bigger boxes to live in, faster and faster cars. Why? Why not just skip all that and do fun s**t?'
'If you have a $10 million mansion and five Lamborghinis and all this s**t then you have to, like, worry, like, 'Oh s**t, if things fall apart I can't afford my lifestyle.' I don't give a f**k, I live in a dorm room.
'My s**t could fall apart tomorrow and my lifestyle doesn't change.
'So there's also a lot of peace of mind with that, because I don't have to maintain anything.'
The humble home features a gallery of awards from YouTube.
The framed photos of Apple founder Steve Jobs on the walls.
Although he chooses to live in his no-bed home, Donaldson has amassed quite a property portfolio in North Carolina.
He snapped up a neighbourhood for himself, his family and his employees after buying five houses in a cul-de-sac in Greenville.
Donaldson bought a two-storey four-bedroom property on the street in 2018 for around $US320,000.
Over the years, Donaldson reportedly purchased the houses off-market.
Parts of this story first appeared in Page Six and was republished with permission.
Sign up to the Herald Sun Weekly Real Estate Update. Click here to get the latest Victorian property market news delivered direct to your inbox.
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This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her
This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her

Sydney Morning Herald

timean hour ago

  • Sydney Morning Herald

This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her

Ninajirachi still remembers that tenth-grade assessment in her high school music class. The assignment was simple: compose a piece of instrumental music. By then she was well versed in dance music production – with the help of YouTube tutorials, she'd already taught herself how to make songs in FL Studio, which she'd got for her 14th birthday (she'd saved up for years and her parents gave her the final bit of cash as a gift). Understandably, her confidence was high. 'I knew my way around a DAW [digital audio workstation], so I was like, 'I can do this, this is what I'm good at!'' she recalls. 'So I made this cool thing using presets and I handed it in like, 'I killed that, no one's gonna have anything as good as that.'' It did not go well. 'I got back this really shit mark! The feedback was that I had used a violin preset and a violin can't physically play what I put in. I was like, 'Oh OK, I see that we're not on the same page here.'' As origin stories go, it couldn't be more precise: the electronic artist set on her path after challenging the possibilities of traditional music. 'That's the thing, I didn't even care,' the 25-year-old DJ and producer says. 'They had wanted us to compose for a real instrument, but I was on a different wavelength already.' Ninajirachi, real name Nina Wilson, is posing in between claw machines at games arcade Koko, looking at home in its futuristic Blade Runner glow. Her blunt red fringe pokes from under her black hoodie, which she removes to reveal an oversized shirt with the slogan 'I wanna f--- my computer', a provocative rendering of the title – and thematic drive – of her new album, I Love My Computer. 'That was a voice memo I had from early 2024,' Wilson says, laughing. 'I had just finished making something that sounded really good, and I was thinking about those memes that are like, 'Listening to music isn't enough, I need to f--- the song.'' Coming almost a decade after her first single as Ninajirachi (her moniker is a portmanteau of her first name and Jirachi, her favourite Pokemon, a plush version of which hangs from her handbag), and having built a reputation as one of Australia's most esteemed and idiosyncratic electronic artists, the album is somehow Wilson's debut full-length. 'I guess I just didn't feel like it until now,' she says. 'Maybe it would have been good for my career to put out an album five years ago, but I just didn't have the vision or the idea for it until now.' Across its 12 noisy and affecting tracks, Wilson charts a life entwined with computers and the internet and the way 'computer music' cracked her world open. On the bouncy highlight iPod Touch, she sings about her teenage years growing up in the Central Coast's beachside Kincumber, and the fantasy world she conjured catching the 64 bus to school and back, her headphones blaring the warped sounds of Rustie and Yung Lean, artists she was discovering on SoundCloud. Like an evocative haiku ('It sounds like iPod Touch, yellow Pikachu case/FL Studio free download in my search history/Hidden underneath my pillow 'cause I should be asleep,' she sings), iPod Touch also outlines Wilson's online and musical initiation. She was watching a YouTube tutorial on how to tie-dye denim shorts when the song playing in the video's background undid her. It was, as she later found out, French DJ Madeon's viral Pop Culture (Live Mashup). 'I was like, 'Oh my god, what is this?'' Wilson recalls. 'I had never heard anything like it. It felt like someone had given me crack. I just wanted to know how it was made.' Growing up on the Central Coast, loving dance music wasn't a normal teenage phase. 'It was mostly skater music, beach music – that was what most of my friends were into. They didn't really like what I was listening to; they thought I'd gone down the rabbit hole,' she says, with a laugh. Even so, Wilson says she felt primed for a career in electronic music. Her mum, who worked primarily in homoeopathy and remedial massage when Wilson was growing up, and her dad, a tradie, were ex-ravers. Mum, who lived in London in the '90s, even frequented Ministry of Sound and stockpiled the label's CDs. By the time Wilson finished high school, she'd already been named a finalist in triple j's Unearthed High and was booking gigs; her parents were instantly supportive. 'Neither of them went to uni so they were like, 'As long as you are making your own money and working hard, we don't care, go give it a go,'' says Wilson. Since she was 17 and still underage, they'd chaperone her to gigs that generally started after 11pm. 'One time I had a gig and my dad came in his pyjamas and flip-flops, and he got asked to leave the venue because he didn't have the right clothes or shoes,' Wilson says. 'I felt like an undercover agent, like no one knows I'm underage and my dad's not even in the venue. I loved it, it felt like a very dangerous lifestyle.' It's an odd thing to attempt to describe Ninajirachi's otherworldly sound; you find yourself turning to nonsense like 'scree', 'scronk', 'grunch' and 'glang' to try to convey her off-kilter sonic madness. The drums on CSIRAC, for example – a track named for the first computer to ever play music, now housed at Scienceworks in Melbourne – recall pots and pans tumbling around a washing machine. Closer All at Once is glitched-out subterranean techno filled with cartoon boings, clatters and laser bursts, an intricate symphony of noise. 'I love novelty and surprise, and I'm just always trying to get as close to that feeling of when I first heard stuff like that,' she says. 'I'm never trying to reinvent the wheel because that's just a crazy goal to have. I just want to make something that impresses me or makes me happy.' After segueing from simple loops on GarageBand as a kid, Wilson's early releases, including her first EP, 2019's Lapland, were made using FL Studio, before she switched to Ableton. 'A lot of it is, like, re-sampling,' Wilson explains of her process. 'If I synthesise something and then re-record it to audio and then do something to that and re-record it to audio again, it becomes this big, long recording of rubbish that I'll then sift through. And then it's like patchwork or collage, getting all the prettiest scraps and putting them together.' All I Am, a whirring trance track built around an MGMT-style chant, was born from an impromptu jam session at Ben Lee's Los Angeles home, with Lee and Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet. 'Ben is so kind and generous, and he really supports Australian musicians that come to America,' Wilson says. 'We all microdosed mushrooms and had such a fun, silly day. The idea was I was at the computer and I was the scribe and they would all just bash on different instruments around Ben's studio and I'd record it and try to turn it into something ... I started playing it at shows and it went off, so I messaged them in the group chat, like, 'Can I release this?', and they were like, 'Oh my god, go for it'.' By I Love My Computer 's second half, technological bliss makes way for dark-web brain-rot. On Infohazard, Wilson's back on her school bus, but now she's being exposed to snuff films and body horror. 'I was so horrified, I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks, just beheading videos and stuff,' says Wilson, recalling the things older boys with 4chan proclivities would share on the way to school. 'It was a huge loss of innocence moment. It made me think of, if I'd never had the internet, or if I'd been this age even 100 years ago, maybe I would never even know about these things?' Perhaps most impressively, I Love My Computer showcases Wilson's range, pivoting from the Dare-style indie sleaze of London Song to the sweet PC Music-influenced propulsion of Delete. 'There's this quote from Lorde that I love so much I have it screenshotted on my desktop and I always think about it – it was in a mailing list email she wrote on the 10-year anniversary of Pure Heroine,' Wilson says. 'It's about how every person is sitting on a gold mine that no one can rob because everyone's unique makeup gives them their own perspective. I feel like, as long as I just do what I like, I can trust that my upbringing, experiences, physiology, taste will combine in a way that makes it all feel like me.' Like every Ninajirachi release since 2018, I Love My Computer comes via NLV Records, the label imprint of Sydney DJ Nina Las Vegas. Having a female mentor to guide her through such a male-dominated industry has been a privilege, Wilson says. 'You're just so naive when you're young, and you don't know what you don't know, and also I don't come from a music family or a white-collar family, so I didn't know anything about business industry stuff. If I hadn't met Nina when I was so young, maybe I would have ended up in other hands who didn't care so much.' Loading More recently, Wilson herself has stepped in as mentor and unifier. In 2022, as part of Vivid, she launched Dark Crystal, a club night celebrating underground dance culture. Inspired by overseas parties like Subculture and Heaven (where she once saw her idol, the late electronic artist Sophie, perform), the event proved so popular that this August she'll host its fourth annual instalment. If privately tinkering in the laptop glow is her musical foundation, performing live is its own reward. 'It's pretty hectic a lot of the time, it's not getting to bed til four or five in the morning and then getting a flight the next day, but I love it,' Wilson says. 'I'm totally sober when I'm touring; I just have heaps of fruit and vitamin C powder, and it's really chill. So even if it's brutal, it's fun. It's all just memory-making.'

This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her
This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her

The Age

timean hour ago

  • The Age

This electronic star failed high school music. But it didn't stop her

Ninajirachi still remembers that tenth-grade assessment in her high school music class. The assignment was simple: compose a piece of instrumental music. By then she was well versed in dance music production – with the help of YouTube tutorials, she'd already taught herself how to make songs in FL Studio, which she'd got for her 14th birthday (she'd saved up for years and her parents gave her the final bit of cash as a gift). Understandably, her confidence was high. 'I knew my way around a DAW [digital audio workstation], so I was like, 'I can do this, this is what I'm good at!'' she recalls. 'So I made this cool thing using presets and I handed it in like, 'I killed that, no one's gonna have anything as good as that.'' It did not go well. 'I got back this really shit mark! The feedback was that I had used a violin preset and a violin can't physically play what I put in. I was like, 'Oh OK, I see that we're not on the same page here.'' As origin stories go, it couldn't be more precise: the electronic artist set on her path after challenging the possibilities of traditional music. 'That's the thing, I didn't even care,' the 25-year-old DJ and producer says. 'They had wanted us to compose for a real instrument, but I was on a different wavelength already.' Ninajirachi, real name Nina Wilson, is posing in between claw machines at games arcade Koko, looking at home in its futuristic Blade Runner glow. Her blunt red fringe pokes from under her black hoodie, which she removes to reveal an oversized shirt with the slogan 'I wanna f--- my computer', a provocative rendering of the title – and thematic drive – of her new album, I Love My Computer. 'That was a voice memo I had from early 2024,' Wilson says, laughing. 'I had just finished making something that sounded really good, and I was thinking about those memes that are like, 'Listening to music isn't enough, I need to f--- the song.'' Coming almost a decade after her first single as Ninajirachi (her moniker is a portmanteau of her first name and Jirachi, her favourite Pokemon, a plush version of which hangs from her handbag), and having built a reputation as one of Australia's most esteemed and idiosyncratic electronic artists, the album is somehow Wilson's debut full-length. 'I guess I just didn't feel like it until now,' she says. 'Maybe it would have been good for my career to put out an album five years ago, but I just didn't have the vision or the idea for it until now.' Across its 12 noisy and affecting tracks, Wilson charts a life entwined with computers and the internet and the way 'computer music' cracked her world open. On the bouncy highlight iPod Touch, she sings about her teenage years growing up in the Central Coast's beachside Kincumber, and the fantasy world she conjured catching the 64 bus to school and back, her headphones blaring the warped sounds of Rustie and Yung Lean, artists she was discovering on SoundCloud. Like an evocative haiku ('It sounds like iPod Touch, yellow Pikachu case/FL Studio free download in my search history/Hidden underneath my pillow 'cause I should be asleep,' she sings), iPod Touch also outlines Wilson's online and musical initiation. She was watching a YouTube tutorial on how to tie-dye denim shorts when the song playing in the video's background undid her. It was, as she later found out, French DJ Madeon's viral Pop Culture (Live Mashup). 'I was like, 'Oh my god, what is this?'' Wilson recalls. 'I had never heard anything like it. It felt like someone had given me crack. I just wanted to know how it was made.' Growing up on the Central Coast, loving dance music wasn't a normal teenage phase. 'It was mostly skater music, beach music – that was what most of my friends were into. They didn't really like what I was listening to; they thought I'd gone down the rabbit hole,' she says, with a laugh. Even so, Wilson says she felt primed for a career in electronic music. Her mum, who worked primarily in homoeopathy and remedial massage when Wilson was growing up, and her dad, a tradie, were ex-ravers. Mum, who lived in London in the '90s, even frequented Ministry of Sound and stockpiled the label's CDs. By the time Wilson finished high school, she'd already been named a finalist in triple j's Unearthed High and was booking gigs; her parents were instantly supportive. 'Neither of them went to uni so they were like, 'As long as you are making your own money and working hard, we don't care, go give it a go,'' says Wilson. Since she was 17 and still underage, they'd chaperone her to gigs that generally started after 11pm. 'One time I had a gig and my dad came in his pyjamas and flip-flops, and he got asked to leave the venue because he didn't have the right clothes or shoes,' Wilson says. 'I felt like an undercover agent, like no one knows I'm underage and my dad's not even in the venue. I loved it, it felt like a very dangerous lifestyle.' It's an odd thing to attempt to describe Ninajirachi's otherworldly sound; you find yourself turning to nonsense like 'scree', 'scronk', 'grunch' and 'glang' to try to convey her off-kilter sonic madness. The drums on CSIRAC, for example – a track named for the first computer to ever play music, now housed at Scienceworks in Melbourne – recall pots and pans tumbling around a washing machine. Closer All at Once is glitched-out subterranean techno filled with cartoon boings, clatters and laser bursts, an intricate symphony of noise. 'I love novelty and surprise, and I'm just always trying to get as close to that feeling of when I first heard stuff like that,' she says. 'I'm never trying to reinvent the wheel because that's just a crazy goal to have. I just want to make something that impresses me or makes me happy.' After segueing from simple loops on GarageBand as a kid, Wilson's early releases, including her first EP, 2019's Lapland, were made using FL Studio, before she switched to Ableton. 'A lot of it is, like, re-sampling,' Wilson explains of her process. 'If I synthesise something and then re-record it to audio and then do something to that and re-record it to audio again, it becomes this big, long recording of rubbish that I'll then sift through. And then it's like patchwork or collage, getting all the prettiest scraps and putting them together.' All I Am, a whirring trance track built around an MGMT-style chant, was born from an impromptu jam session at Ben Lee's Los Angeles home, with Lee and Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet. 'Ben is so kind and generous, and he really supports Australian musicians that come to America,' Wilson says. 'We all microdosed mushrooms and had such a fun, silly day. The idea was I was at the computer and I was the scribe and they would all just bash on different instruments around Ben's studio and I'd record it and try to turn it into something ... I started playing it at shows and it went off, so I messaged them in the group chat, like, 'Can I release this?', and they were like, 'Oh my god, go for it'.' By I Love My Computer 's second half, technological bliss makes way for dark-web brain-rot. On Infohazard, Wilson's back on her school bus, but now she's being exposed to snuff films and body horror. 'I was so horrified, I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks, just beheading videos and stuff,' says Wilson, recalling the things older boys with 4chan proclivities would share on the way to school. 'It was a huge loss of innocence moment. It made me think of, if I'd never had the internet, or if I'd been this age even 100 years ago, maybe I would never even know about these things?' Perhaps most impressively, I Love My Computer showcases Wilson's range, pivoting from the Dare-style indie sleaze of London Song to the sweet PC Music-influenced propulsion of Delete. 'There's this quote from Lorde that I love so much I have it screenshotted on my desktop and I always think about it – it was in a mailing list email she wrote on the 10-year anniversary of Pure Heroine,' Wilson says. 'It's about how every person is sitting on a gold mine that no one can rob because everyone's unique makeup gives them their own perspective. I feel like, as long as I just do what I like, I can trust that my upbringing, experiences, physiology, taste will combine in a way that makes it all feel like me.' Like every Ninajirachi release since 2018, I Love My Computer comes via NLV Records, the label imprint of Sydney DJ Nina Las Vegas. Having a female mentor to guide her through such a male-dominated industry has been a privilege, Wilson says. 'You're just so naive when you're young, and you don't know what you don't know, and also I don't come from a music family or a white-collar family, so I didn't know anything about business industry stuff. If I hadn't met Nina when I was so young, maybe I would have ended up in other hands who didn't care so much.' Loading More recently, Wilson herself has stepped in as mentor and unifier. In 2022, as part of Vivid, she launched Dark Crystal, a club night celebrating underground dance culture. Inspired by overseas parties like Subculture and Heaven (where she once saw her idol, the late electronic artist Sophie, perform), the event proved so popular that this August she'll host its fourth annual instalment. If privately tinkering in the laptop glow is her musical foundation, performing live is its own reward. 'It's pretty hectic a lot of the time, it's not getting to bed til four or five in the morning and then getting a flight the next day, but I love it,' Wilson says. 'I'm totally sober when I'm touring; I just have heaps of fruit and vitamin C powder, and it's really chill. So even if it's brutal, it's fun. It's all just memory-making.'

Supermodel Paulina Porizkova, 60, proudly shows off her body in unfiltered snaps: ‘This is me'
Supermodel Paulina Porizkova, 60, proudly shows off her body in unfiltered snaps: ‘This is me'

News.com.au

time2 hours ago

  • News.com.au

Supermodel Paulina Porizkova, 60, proudly shows off her body in unfiltered snaps: ‘This is me'

Paulina Porizkova is proudly showing her figure – minus the filters – at age 60. The supermodel shared two snaps of herself on Instagram on Tuesday, highlighting the differences between one photo with a flattering angle and good lighting, and another photo without. 'This is me. Vacation, pretty light, posing for a shot,' she said of the first picture of her in a white bikini standing in front of a picturesque view. 'This is also me,' she shared of the second picture of herself in a nude bra and underwear in a bathroom, rocking grey hair. 'Home, not great light, not posing.' Porizkova admitted to experiencing ups and downs over the years when it comes to diet and exercise. 'This is 60. This is 60 years of sometimes healthy eating, sometimes not. 60 years of sometimes working out, sometimes not,' she wrote. '60 years of doing the right things followed by doing the wrong things and over again and again,' she continued. 'It's 60 years of learning of what works and what doesn't. And just as I think I've figured it out, everything changes and I have to start again.' Porizkova shared what she has learned to accept at this stage in her life. 'The beauty of 60 is that now I understand the importance is IN the lesson, not passing the exam,' she noted. The Swedish model, who is a spokesperson for Estée Lauder, has spoken out about ageing before. 'I feel like we're so scared of wrinkles,' Porizkova said during an appearance on the US Today show in January. 'Have you noticed that? We're so terrified of wrinkles because I suppose wrinkles make us no longer relevant, no longer sexy, no longer desirable, and as women, that has been sort of our calling card — it's tagged with us for such a long time.' 'And I keep looking at wrinkles — mine, yours, any woman that I see — and I think, 'It's your map of life,'' she continued. 'I see how you are as a person. Why would you want to erase it? Why do we make wrinkles on the same par as acne?' Earlier this month, the mother of two got engaged to producer Jeff Greenstein, six years after the death of her husband, Cars frontman Ric Ocasek. Porizkova and Ocasek married in 1989 and welcomed two sons together — Jonathan, 31, and Oliver, 27 — before announcing their separation in 2018 after 28 years of marriage. He died in 2019. She and Greenstein, who was the showrunner of Will & Grace, went public with their relationship in May 2023.

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