One of the things that makes Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson such a great children’s entertainer is his willingness to slap his dead stare and frozen, toothy grin on just about anything. Whether it’s moldy Lunchables knockoffs, a Saudi Arabian theme park, or a real-life game show version of a satirical action drama about the ills of capitalism (that, in fact, proved its own point through the array of lawsuits and workplace violations connected to Beast Games), Donovan has no compunction about selling his junk to kids. While Ms. Rachel gets death threats for platforming Palestinian children of war, MrBeast became a billionaire off performative philanthropy and one of the deadest smiles to ever grace a camera. Per The New York Times, though, he’s found his next venture: Finance, you know, for kids!
The 27-year-old founder of MrBeast Burger recently acquired The Step, a financial services app for teens and young adults, reportedly with a user base of 7 million. Along with debit cards for youngsters, The Step offers kids parentally controlled savings and investment accounts to help them build credit. Unsurprisingly, given the cravenness of Beastified capitalism, those investments include such stable ventures as crypto. The company has already received a $200 million investment from Bitmine Immersion Technology, owned by Tom Lee, who personally owns 5% of the world’s Ether supply and is just the type of guy who should have access to children’s money.
MrBeast hopes to teach his audience of more than a billion a lesson in financial responsibility. “I’m so excited to share that we are acquiring the financial services app, @step,” MrBeast, the children’s entertainer, wrote on X, the Everything app littered with CSAM material. “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.” According to the Times, Beast learned about investing from watching Call Of Duty Let’s Play videos on YouTube, and he hopes to pass on that sage advice to Feastables buyers. Maybe, one day, they too can make a billion dollars from videos in which lives are endangered for entertainment. And they should trust him, considering MrBeast has denied involvement in various crypto pump-and-dump schemes. But they shan’t be selling memecoins; instead, they want to launch a stablecoin to help kids invest in the wildly unstable world of cryptocurrency via a Robinhood-esque app for children. It wouldn’t be the first time. In 2022, Step announced “the first financial app that will allow both teens under 18 and young adults to buy, sell, hold, and receive crypto.” It never got off the ground, but with the help of the world’s most famous billionaire, who built up his young audience’s trust by slapping his name on unsafe game shows, kids everywhere might soon be trading Beast coin like the entrepreneurs they look up to.
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