MrBeast visits UNC campus, gifts random students cash for forthcoming video
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- MrBeast returned to spontaneous campus giveaways, gifting a UNC student $30,000.
- The $30,000 gift aimed to cover one academic year amid rising tuition and fees.
- The stunt echoes Donaldson’s early local giveaways despite larger studio productions.
MrBeast got back to his stunt-making roots by surprising a few UNC-Chapel Hill students with enough cash to cover their tuition for a year. “Here’s the final $10,000,” the world’s most-followed YouTuber said as he placed another briefcase in one student’s hands. “Can you even hold it?”
The video posted Sunday by the local events account Raleigh Downtown shows MrBeast filming a yet-unreleased tuition payment stunt on the flagship UNC campus. In the clip, he proclaims the $30,000 he just bestowed a student will be enough to cover their tuition this academic year. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, then prompts the student to tell viewers to follow his Instagram account as others walk by the scene.
UNC-Chapel Hill’s in-state tuition is only $7,020, but the cost can rise above $27,000 after factoring fees, housing, food, supplies and other expenses. For out-of-state students, tuition alone this year is $43,152.
While the context behind this video isn’t known, spontaneous cash giveaways to unsuspecting North Carolina residents was a hallmark of early MrBeast stunts. Now 27, Donaldson gained online notoriety as a teenager living in Greenville where he filmed individual feats of strengths and inventive prize handouts. In his first viral video, Donaldson sat at his computer and painstakingly counted to 100,000. Then for his initial cash giveaway stunt, Donaldson convinced a sponsor to give him $10,000, which he handed to a local homeless man.
Donaldson grew his giveaways as he attracted more followers. His crew once tipped a waitress $10,000, dropped $20,000 from a drone, and awarded pizza delivery drivers a new car and an entire house. One year for Halloween, MrBeast handed out iPhones.
Local residents were the beneficiaries. Donaldson’s crew once went through Greenville putting money on trees. In 2020, they raced around downtown Raleigh trying to gift free vehicles to incredulous passersby. At the end of that video, MrBeast picked up an Uber customer in a yellow Lamborghini and hands him the keys.
And in 2023, MrBeast approached an East Carolina University student on campus and, after confirming the student followed MrBeast on YouTube, gave him $20,000 to cover tuition. Perhaps due to his rising fame, Donaldson has begun to scale back the number of videos in which he walks around town — or a campus — to give strangers cash.
Today, MrBeast maintains a filming studio in Greenville, but the bigger budgets behind his productions means his team frequently shoots in locations far outside North Carolina. Exotic locales include remote Caribbean islands, and the first season of his Amazon Prime reality competition “Beast Games” filmed in Las Vegas. Last month, North Carolina awarded a $15 million incentive for parts of the next “Beast Games” season to be shot near Greenville and Wilmington.
MrBeast’s YouTube account currently has 443 million subscribers, the most of any account on the video platform. His recent videos feature high-production stunts: “Would you Risk Dying for $500,000?” (72 million views), “Survive 30 Days Chained To Your Ex, Win $250,000” (132 million views), and “$1 vs $1,000,000,000 Nuclear Bunker!” (111 million views). His philanthropic-focused stunts have also grown in scope, with a video earlier this year purporting to feed one person for every click it received (it has gotten 72 million clicks).
But in Chapel Hill, Donaldson seems to have dipped into one of his older stunt formats to leave a student laughing in disbelief.
This story was originally published October 6, 2025 at 1:52 PM.
