Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, sent a 12-page letter today to Jimmy Donaldson, the popular YouTuber better known as MrBeast, requesting more details about his company’s plans to expand into financial services. In February, his company, Beast Industries, purchased a banking app called Step that had planned to promote cryptocurrency to its young users.
Though Ms. Warren did not accuse the company of any wrongdoing, she asked over a dozen questions and requested additional information about its move into the highly regulated world of finance. She also raised concerns about the company’s banking partner, Evolve Bank & Trust, but much of the letter was devoted to Beast Industries’s plans to potentially push cryptocurrency to children.
Ms. Warren’s inquiry comes in the wake of reporting in The New York Times earlier this month about Beast Industries’s cryptocurrency plans. In a 2021 interview, Mr. Donaldson discussed a million-dollar Bitcoin bet that he had personally made and investments in several CryptoPunks, a type of nonfungible token, or NFT. Some of those bets returned 20 or 30 times the money he had laid out, he told interviewers.
Beast Industries filed a trademark application last year for “MrBeast Financial,” which could offer loan products like cash advances and credit cards. It mentioned cryptocurrency four times.