MrBeast Posts First ‘Test’ Video on X, as Elon Musk Tries to Lure Creators to Platform

One of YouTube’s biggest stars has posted his first video on X, a win for Elon Musk as he tries to entice buzzy creators and influencers onto the former Twitter.

The billionaire re-posted a video created by Jimmy Donaldson, better known to his 230 million-plus YouTube subscribers as MrBeast. That’s after a back-and-forth dating back years, during which the Tesla Inc. chief executive traded messages with the online celeb about X’s potential.

Donaldson currently sports more than 25 million X followers — still a fraction of his YouTube footprint. His tweet had racked up close to 30 million views as of early Tuesday.

Musk’s vision is to transform the social media platform he took over in 2022 into what he calls “the everything app,” or a collection of the services that users now turn to on their smartphones. Musk has mentioned his interest in making X more competitive with Google’s YouTube, the global leader in online video. This month, X announced a slate of new shows, including a partnership with former CNN anchor Don Lemon.

But it still has only a fraction of the users on rival services such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, and advertisers have migrated to other platforms. Ad revenue was on track to slump in 2023, in part because of brands’ concerns about changes to X’s content-moderation policies.