borrowing

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is 27 years old, more than 600 million followers and a company with a valuation close to $5 billion, according to Fortune. Despite all that, and as he himself recognized in a recent interview for The Wall Street Journalthe millionaire YouTuber assures that “I have negative money right now. I ask for a loan. Everyone who watches this video has more money than me in their bank account.” According to MrBeast, he doesn’t even have money to go to McDonald’s. It sounds like a joke considering that he spends several million dollars on each of his videos, but it’s not entirely. Having billions is not the same as having money. The first thing to understand is that Donaldson’s “net worth” is not a figure in his checking account. According to Celebrity Net Worth MrBeast’s fortune would be around $2.6 billion in 2026, but almost everything comes from him participation in Beast Industriesits business holding company. He has a little more than half of a company that is worth 5 billion on paper. But those are stocks, not cash. When someone says that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are the richest in the worldtalks about the value of his assets, among which are his shares in Tesla, SpaceX or Amazon. If they sold their entire stake at once, the price of those shares would collapse. That’s why they don’t sell. And that’s why they don’t need to do it either. pay their mansionsyour whims or your vacations. Why borrowing is cheaper than selling. Here comes what MrBeast does not tell in the interview, but what is truly important in this verbal shell game. Every time someone sells shares and makes a profit on them, they pay taxes on that difference. It is the so-called surplus value. In the US, this tax can reach 20% or more of the profit. If you have shares worth 100 million and you bought them for 10, selling them means a huge bill only in taxes. Therefore, millionaires only use this resource when they need to unlock that cash to make new investmentsnot for “your expenses.” The other option is to use those shares as collateral to request a loan. Borrowed money is not taxed, because it is not income: it is debt not an income. Banks offer their richest clients very low interest rates in exchange for having those shares as collateral. Dividends or the company’s own growth pay off the loan little by little. The debt is renewed from time to time, but the taxes on that money never arrive. “Buy, borrow, die”: the trick with its own name. This way of managing money it even has a name: buy, borrow, die (buy, borrow, die). You buy assets or found companies, you borrow money using those assets as collateral to live on without selling them, and when you die the heirs receive the shares valued at the price at that moment. The years of accumulated earnings They no longer count for the tax calculation. The US Senate has been trying to close this tax hole for years without much success. The trick of the symbolic salary of one dollar or the minimum allowed by law what some CEOs use it works the same. Steve Jobs did it. Larry Ellison too. These millionaires barely receive any salary income for their work but, in reality, the value of their shares increases every year and that money does not pass through the treasury until they sell them. The “I’m not that rich” story and what it’s for. The curious thing about the MrBeast case is not the financial strategy he uses, which is the same one that large fortunes have been using for decades. The curious thing is that he tells it in public as if it were a confession. “Everyone has more money than me in their account,” collected Fortune. In June 2025 he wrote in your X profile that he had asked his mother for money to pay for his wedding. He presents himself as someone with a 5 billion company who borrows money from his mother. These statements serve a very specific objective: to give him the appearance of a normal person who reinvests everything he earns and lives without luxuries and with just enough. This message works well when you have a young audience in front of you who can see themselves reflected, and it takes the focus off the real fact: that his shares in Beast Industries are worth more than 2.6 billion and give him access to cheap credit in any bank in the world that none of his followers could aspire to. What really measures the wealth of someone like that?. The truly useful figure that measures your wealth is not your bank balance or your salary. Actually, the basis of everything is your assets: how much of Beast Industries you own, how much does Feastables worthwhat generated the agreement with Amazon by Beast Games. His company had a turnover of close to 500 million in 2024 and expected to reach 900 million in 2025. With that in mind, Donaldson can live, travel and spend 250 million a year on production of his videos without touching his participation in Beast Industries. The bank is happy to lend you because you have the best possible guarantee: a company that is worth more every day. The fact that your checking account is in the red is a strategy, not a problem as it supposes for the rest of humanity that is left out of that 1.1% of ultra-rich. In Xataka | There is a formula so that saving at the end of the month is not an impossible mission: the 50-30-20 rule Image | Feastables