Why Elon Musk once gave $1m to Mr Beast

YouTuber MrBeast revealed that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk once gave him $1m - and it was for a noble cause.

For those unfamiliar with the 24-year-old American content creator - whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson - he happens to be one of the most-followed people on YouTube with 105 million subscribers.

He makes big-budget stunt videos, and went mega-viral for his recreation of the wildly popular Netflix show Squid Game.

And one time, it turns out he event snagged the attention of the world's richest man.

In a conversation with the Lessons in 30s YouTube channel, the creator revealed that the $1m donation happened while promoting his #TeamTree fundraiser in 2019.

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MrBeast had teamed up with the Arbor Day Foundation to try and plant 20 million trees, setting himself a target of $20m in donations to achieve that goal.

"We hit like $6m in the first few days, and it started to slow down," MrBeast told the channel before adding that Musk came out of the blue to reply to one of his tweets.

"And he's just like, 'oh, this looks interesting,'" he said.

MrBeast then shared that his friend and fellow YouTuber Marques Brownlee told the tech billionaire more about the project.

"Marques was like, 'This is cool, you should donate,' and he was like, 'Sure, why not?'" MrBeast continued.

"And then Elon just donated a million dollars."

Due to Musk's interest in the project, it also meant that donations from other people also came flooding in.

Musk wasn't the only person to offer the YouTuber big bucks.

MrBeast recently told the FLAGRANT podcast that someone offered him $1bn for his channel.

Speaking to the host Andrew Schulz, he shared that there's been a few people interested in purchasing his channel, but he wasn't interested in the offer.

"Like you know, 'a billion dollars if we could own the channel and the companies' and stuff like that. And I'm like, 'oh, that sounds enticing, but I don't know if I want to work for my YouTube channel.'"

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