MrBeast is days from half a billion subscribers. Nobody's ever been here.

MrBeast is days away from becoming the first YouTube channel in history to hit half a billion subscribers. As of June 4, Jimmy Donaldson sat at roughly 496 million and was adding about 133,000 per day, putting the milestone within a week. No individual creator, no media company, no record label has ever stood where he is about to stand.

⚡ Key Takeaways

MrBeast hit roughly 496M YouTube subscribers as of June 4, putting the 500M milestone within a week at his current 133K-per-day pace.
He added 4M subscribers in the final week of May 2026, the largest single-week gain Tubefilter has ever recorded for any channel.
T-Series in second place has about 310M, leaving MrBeast with a nearly 190M lead, the widest #1 to #2 gap in YouTube history.
Beast Industries is now a roughly $5B holding company with a fresh $200M Bitmine check, the Step acquisition, and an upcoming MrBeast Financial product.
The lesson for creators is that a single brand's ceiling is provably uncapped, which makes the gap between an 8% fee and a 15% to 20% fee compound into real money over a career.

What actually happened?

During the final week of May, the main MrBeast channel added 4 million subscribers in seven days. That is the largest single-week gain Tubefilter has ever recorded since it began publishing global YouTube rankings. The surge pulled the projected 500M crossing forward from end of July to mid-June.

The channel sits at roughly 496 million subscribers per InfluencersWiki tracking, with the half-billion line within striking distance at his current pace. T-Series, the channel in second place, has about 310 million subscribers per Wikipedia's Social Blade aggregated rankings. The gap between #1 and #2 on YouTube has never been wider in the platform's history.

Why does this matter for creators?

Half a billion subscribers used to be territory reserved for consumer brands and music labels. Now it belongs to one guy from North Carolina making YouTube videos with a production crew. Donaldson is on pace to add another 100 million subscribers in roughly twelve months after becoming the first creator to cross 400M on June 1, 2025 per Hypebeast, a faster cadence than his last 100M jump.

The takeaway for creators in 2026 is not that anyone should try to be MrBeast. It is that the ceiling on a single, well-run creator brand is now provably uncapped. The category once called YouTuber now contains at least one operator running at network-television scale, and the math is going to keep stretching.

"During the last week of May, MrBeast added four million new subscribers. That wasn't just the highest total of the week. It's the highest seven-day sum we've ever seen since we started issuing this ranking."
Tubefilter editorial, weekly YouTube rankings, week of 05/31/2026

What's the bigger picture?

The milestone arrives alongside a parallel business shift. Beast Industries, Donaldson's holding company, closed a round at roughly $5 billion in November 2025 per Will Ventures. In January 2026, Tom Lee's Bitmine put in another $200 million per Bloomberg. February brought the acquisition of youth fintech app Step plus a filed trademark for MrBeast Financial, a planned crypto exchange and payments product.

Time named Beast Industries to its 2026 TIME100 Most Influential Companies list. The framing was no longer YouTube star with side businesses. It was a vertically integrated media holding company that happens to publish a YouTube channel at the top of the funnel.

What does Fanvault think?

Fanvault thinks half a billion subscribers makes the platform fee question existential, not academic. When a creator audience can plausibly grow into the hundreds of millions and the surrounding business into the billions, the difference between an 8% platform fee and a 15% to 20% one stops being a line item. It is the difference between a comfortable living and a Beast Industries-style holding company.

Fanvault charges 8% per transaction and leaves 92% with the creator. The stack around it (a storefront with authenticated memorabilia, paywalled content, tips, wishlists, and a Telegram-native automation layer) handles the operations work most creators currently outsource. The MrBeast blueprint rewards stacking owned monetization surfaces and keeping every dollar that does not have to leave. That is the math Fanvault was built for.

Half a billion is days away. The next ceiling is anyone's guess. It is definitely not zero.

Frequently Asked Questions

When will MrBeast hit 500 million YouTube subscribers?

Tubefilter's current projection is mid-June 2026, pulled forward from an original estimate of late July. At Donaldson's June 2026 pace of roughly 133,000 new subscribers per day per InfluencersWiki, the channel is within a week of the half-billion line.

How big is the gap between MrBeast and the #2 YouTube channel?

About 190 million subscribers. T-Series sits in second place at roughly 310 million and Cocomelon is third at around 200 million per Wikipedia's Social Blade aggregated rankings. No individual creator has ever opened that kind of distance on the rest of the platform.

What is Beast Industries and how does it relate to the MrBeast channel?

Beast Industries is Donaldson's parent holding company. It closed a round valuing the business at roughly $5 billion in November 2025 per Will Ventures, took a $200 million investment from Tom Lee's Bitmine in January 2026 per Bloomberg, acquired youth fintech app Step in February, and filed a trademark for MrBeast Financial, a planned crypto exchange and payments product. Time added the company to its 2026 TIME100 Most Influential Companies list, framing it as a creator-owned media business operating at network-television scale.

What does this mean for creators who are not anywhere near MrBeast's scale?

The practical takeaway is not 'try to be MrBeast.' It is that the ceiling on a single creator brand is now provably uncapped, which makes platform fee economics matter more, not less, over a career. At the top of the curve, the gap between an 8% platform fee and a 15% to 20% one compounds into the difference between a comfortable living and a vertically integrated holding company. The second-order lesson is that owned monetization (storefront, paywalled content, memorabilia, tips, wishlists) beats rented monetization on every long enough timeline.