A long night filming with MrBeast in his North Carolina hometown
I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.
Greenville, North Carolina, is where MrBeast graduated high school. It’s where he filmed his first viral video — a feat of stamina and jaw control that saw the future YouTube star count to 100,000 uninterrupted. He was 18. It took 40 hours.
Greenville, population 96,000 and home to East Carolina University, is where MrBeast grew his online profile stunt after stunt, subscriber after subscriber. It’s where pizza delivery drivers got tipped $10,000 — or an entire house. It’s where a waiter won a private island. Jimmy Donaldson, the man behind MrBeast, has purchased multiple properties around his hometown, through business entities named JSD Real Estate, Heintzelman LLC, and Creative Grids.
In 2019, JSD Real Estate paid more than $1 million to buy land from a local Baptist church, Pitt County property records show. Donaldson followed that up by acquiring several houses, including a $975,000 gated home (listed on Zillow as having 6.5 bathrooms) in late 2022. Around this time, MrBeast opened a new studio north of downtown that’s now valued at $16.5 million.
If you’re intrigued by such large sums, then MrBeast videos may be for you. And I might also recommend Beast Games, the Amazon reality competition that filmed a portion of its upcoming third season Sunday night at the East Carolina University football stadium in front of 15,000 people. I was one of them.
Doors opened around 8:20 p.m., but some lining up outside the stadium had been there since noon. A group of college students came straight from church, swapping their Sunday best for blue shirts with hot pink letters that collectively spelled out “B-E-A-S-T G-A-M-E-S.”
“We had a tent set up,” ECU student John Casalaspro, 20, said with an “S” on his chest. “We had some chairs, we hung out, then we DoorDashed some food and got some drinks and some ice, and just chilled.”
It was a wet and humid Memorial Day eve in Greenville. Brian Futrell wore a rain poncho in line as he and his children waved to a drone passing overhead. They had driven an hour to be there. His daughter Briana, 14, figured she’d excel at the MrBeast competition where you win money by living inside a grocery store.
Upon entering Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium, the powers that be (Amazon/Beast Industries) had everyone place their phones in locked pouches. The handful of media members in attendance also promised not to share episode spoilers — which will make the next paragraph pretty vague.
Contestants competed in a series of centerpiece games. There were lucrative prizes punctuated with fireworks and a celebrity cameo. Donaldson is known to edit his videos to a science, studying viewer habits to keep people engaged. He displayed this orchestration in real time, at one point asking the thousands before him to do something in unison by explaining, “It will look really awesome in the show.”
But for a live taping, which stretched well past midnight, there were also drawn-out interludes as crew members readied equipment for the next event.
Not that the crowd was bored. Everyone was given a non-vegetarian-friendly meal voucher for one hot dog, one bag of chips, one box of popcorn, a drink, and a Feastables chocolate. Music rarely stopped. Donaldson juggled setting up shots for his future Amazon audience by engaging the stands with a mix of host energy and dry humor. At one point, he asked his crew member Tareq to “Hit the Siuuu,” which is something I had to Google but the decidedly Gen Alpha/Gen Z spectators appreciated.
And money was everywhere. Attendees could win cash if their raffle numbers were called — from $1,000 to $10,000. The slim prospect of walking away richer was a draw; before entering the stadium, I saw a group of young children roar “We love money, yeah!” into a camera.
What was largely absent was any mention of Greenville. Donaldson shared few if any childhood memories or references to this being his hometown. The production was set in Eastern North Carolina, but the event was ultimately geared for Amazon’s global audience. Perhaps Donaldson will disclose more once the episode airs — in a biographical voiceover or a visit to his old haunts. But this omission gave the live taping a bit of a sterile feel. Like it was all occurring in a controlled fantasy world, not in a place off Interstate 587 where the ECU Pirates play their home games.
Or maybe Donaldson divulged his most cherished local high school memories after I left. Unlike the man who counted to 100,000, I didn’t make it to the end. At 20 minutes past midnight, with an hour-and-a-half drive back to Durham in front of me, I headed for the parking lot.
But few others were streaming out of the stadium. The final game had just begun. And there was a $10,000 raffle to follow.
Clearing my cache
- JetZero plans to break ground on its multibillion-dollar plane factory next month in Greensboro, marking the beginning of the biggest private jobs project in recent North Carolina history. The company has scheduled the ceremony for June 15.
- Raleigh-based Red Hat and its parent IBM pledged $5 billion to build an “enterprise clearinghouse” to fix coding vulnerabilities at a mass scale.
- Automotive supplier BorgWarner has gotten into the data center game (who hasn’t?) by making modular turbine generators in the Western North Carolina city of Hendersonville. The state this week awarded the company an economic incentive to add 378 jobs and $100 million to its WNC operation.
- Throwing shade: A beachside controversy is brewing around the wildly popular Shibumi canopies, which are made by a Raleigh company founded by three UNC graduates. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on these divisive covers that will be everywhere along the Carolina coast this summer (except on those beaches that ban them).
- Will say it again, many incentive-backed jobs announcements never actually materialize... North Carolina this week canceled its 2024 jobs grant for Crystal Window & Door to build a 500-worker factory in the Johnston County town of Selma. Crystal Window requested this termination due to “a combination of unforeseen business, geopolitical and economic factors.”
- Gov. Josh Stein issued an executive order Wednesday banning most state agency employees from leveraging nonpublic information to bet on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. That same day, federal prosecutors indicted a Google employee for leveraging confidential business info to make $1.2 million on Polymarket.
- Who employs the most in the Triangle? New state data sheds light on the answer while reflecting which organizations lost and gained workers during a volatile year.
- Durham’s RTI International is working with the Democratic Republic of Congo to monitor the current Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. RTI was one of several Triangle organizations to lose workforce in 2025 due to the closure of USAID.
- ProPublica has reported that top White House adviser Peter Navarro was behind the Pentagon fast-tracking a $620 million loan last year to Vulcan Elements, a Research Triangle Park startup that’s constructing a rare earth magnet factory in Johnston County. This deal came three months after Vulcan raised money from 1789 Capital, which has Donald Trump Jr. as a partner. “Vulcan Elements has had no contact with Donald Trump Jr.,” Vulcan CEO John Maslin told me in an emailed statement last month. “And 1789 has had no role in our work with the U.S. Government.”
National Tech Happenings
- Micron Technology has joined the swelling list of $1 trillion companies. The Idaho semiconductor company makes memory chips that are in hot demand due to AI.
- Waymo paused robotaxi service in a half-dozen cities after one of its vehicles drove into a flooded area. The company, which began testing this year in Charlotte, also temporarily suspended all highway routes as it seeks to improve its software.
- In international tech happenings, the Chinese company Huawei said it will be capable of producing high-end semiconductor chips by 2031 — an accomplishment that would circumvent U.S. sanctions.
- Illinois lawmakers passed what’s arguably the nation’s strictest AI legislation. The bill, which still needs the governor’s signature, would require independent safety audits of artificial intelligence providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.
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This story was originally published May 29, 2026 at 9:19 AM.
