MrBeast Told Billionaire Mark Cuban He ‘Spends Millions of Dollars Reverse Engineering the Algorithms on Each Platform’ So He Never Runs Out of Ideas

In WIRED's The Big Interview, Mark Cuban described how the internet's most-watched creator decides what to film. "I had a conversation with MrBeast that was illuminating to no end," Cuban told WIRED's Lauren Goode. “And he basically said […] he spends millions of dollars reverse engineering the algorithms on each platform. That's where he comes up with the ideas on what to do next.”

Cuban was not, in the moment, talking about YouTube. The exchange came a month after the 2024 election, as Goode asked how anyone could tell what was really happening on social media. Cuban, who had campaigned for Kamala Harris, said the answer was to "flood the zone" with clips and memes, and he offered MrBeast as the proof that distribution can be engineered. "[That's what] I told the Harris campaign and, you know, they really didn't pursue it," he said, before relaying the conversation. "That's exactly what the next political campaign has got to do." He had made the same argument on MSNBC in October 2024, saying the campaign "has got to come up and reverse-engineer these algorithms and come up with a response."

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Cuban's description of the mechanism was blunter than most platform executives would offer. "The algorithm always finds you with things that you've shown interest in," he told Goode, and "each one of us […] has their own algorithm on Twitter." In his telling, the way to reach people is not to produce one better message but to produce so many variants that something lands in every feed. "The algorithms don't filter out, right? They filter forward. And that's politics going forward."

MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has said versions of this himself. In interviews going back to 2022, he has described tracking exactly where viewers stop watching and rebuilding videos around those drop-off points. An internal onboarding document for his production staff that leaked in September 2024 was reported to organize the entire operation around three YouTube metrics: click-through rate, average view duration, and retention. Cuban's version adds that the same approach applies platform by platform, and that it is paid for at a scale most media companies would recognize as a research budget.

The scale makes the spend plausible. According to investor materials first reported by The Verge and detailed by Bloomberg in March 2025, Beast Industries lost almost $60 million in 2024. Its Feastables snack line generated roughly $250 million in sales and more than $20 million in profit, while the media business produced similar sales and lost almost $80 million. The company had raised more than $450 million over four years, and a Series C led by Alpha Wave reportedly valued it at about $5 billion. 

Cuban's interest in this is not new, and it is not only political. He has argued for years that technology adoption is a competitive weapon, warning that businesses ignoring artificial intelligence (AI) are already falling behind and that the people dismissing it sound like "internet-deniers." The MrBeast anecdote is the same instinct pointed at distribution: The platforms are owned by Alphabet (GOOGL) and Meta Platforms (META), their ranking systems are private, and the creator who treats them as a problem to be solved with money has an edge over the one who treats them as weather.

That is also the uncomfortable half of the story for everyone without the budget. If Cuban's account is right, the ideas that reach a quarter of a billion subscribers are downstream of an engineering operation, and the gap between a creator who can fund one and a creator who cannot is not talent. Cuban offered it as a lesson for campaigns.

On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.