YouTuber MrBeast has 1 million more followers on Threads than Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg — and he's not the only one

• YouTube star MrBeast beat Mark Zuckerberg to hitting 1 million followers on Meta's new app Threads.
• The YouTuber now has 4.1 million Threads followers while Zuckerberg has 2.7 million, according to the app.

MrBeast, the world's biggest YouTuber, has overtaken Mark Zuckerberg in followers on Meta's new app, Threads — and he's not the only one.

The YouTuber, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, became the first person to hit 1 million Threads followers on July 6 at around 9:42 a.m. EST, according to a post from Guinness World Records. A comment from the organization on its TikTok page said that Zuckerberg hit the 1 million milestone 20 minutes after Donaldson did, "narrowly missing out on record glory."

Zuckerberg has 2.7 million followers as of July 10, while Donaldson has 4.1 million, according to their follower accounts displayed on the mobile version of the app.

There is some discrepancy in individual users' follower counts between the mobile and desktop displays, although both show that Donaldson has more followers than Zuckerberg.

Though the app is not currently available for use on desktop, users' profiles are accessible to view on the website, which appears to round the numbers to the nearest million, showing 4 million followers for Donaldson and 3 million for Zuckerberg. Insider reached out to Meta to ask about this discrepancy but did not receive an immediate response.

Zuckerberg appears to have been the first user to create a Threads account, according to a badge displaying the app's logo and the number 1 on his Instagram profile on the app.

However, Zuckerberg has been overtaken by a large handful of celebrities, such as Chris Hemsworth and Jennifer Lopez, who have 3.1 and 3.2 million followers on Threads.

Donaldson himself has since been overtaken in Threads followers by Kim Kardashian and Selena Gomez, who have 4.3 and 4.2 and million followers respectively.

The app requires users to sign in with an existing Instagram account and allows them to follow everyone they already follow on Instagram on their Threads account. Accounts with large Instagram followings have therefore been able to accumulate significant followings on Threads relatively quickly.

Gomez, for example, is the third most-followed individual on Instagram, behind Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi (neither of whom have Threads accounts at the time of writing), with 420 million followers, according to the analytics website Socialtracker.

On Twitter, Elon Musk, who has been the company's CEO since October 2022, is currently the most-followed user on the platform, with 147 million followers, according to analytics tracker SocialBlade.

Donaldson, who has 166 million YouTube subscribers, is known for giving away large sums of money to viewers. He rose to fame in 2018 by donating thousands of dollars to small Twitch streamers and YouTubers.

More recently, he has filmed elaborate competitions where fans take part in videos with the chance to win large prizes. In 2021, he recreated the Netflix show "Squid Game" for a competition involving 456 supporters, and in June 2022, he gave away $500,000 to a fan in a competition inspired by "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory."

Threads was launched by Meta on July 6 as a competitor app to Twitter. It received 10 million sign-ups in its first seven hours of launching, according to a post on the platform by Mark Zuckerberg, and now has more than 100 million users, reaching the milestone even faster than OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to estimates from data tracking platform Quiver Quantitative.

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