Good morning. Tents up. Comedy creator Jake Shane is making his Broadway debut next week in All Out: Comedy About Ambition alongside actors Ray Romano, Jenny Slate, and Nicholas Braun.

FYI—our reaction to the news looked a lot like this.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson’s holding company, Beast Industries (currently valued at over $5 billion), just acquired financial services app Step.

Context: Donaldson hinted at the acquisition in December at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, where he also announced Beast Industries’ plans to move into telecoms with Beast Mobile. Step’s services are marketed towards teens and young adults looking to build credit, save money, and invest.

“Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up,” Donaldson posted on X. “I want to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had.”

Next steps: Although Donaldson registered a trademark for Beast Financial, he plans to run Step as a separate business for now, according to The Information. He also plans to launch a financial education YouTube channel. Some creators (like our own Samir Chaudry) are speculating that Donaldson is working towards an IPO with the acquisition.

“[In order for Donaldson to go public], he needs to add to his portfolio brands that have recurring revenue and consumers that last a lifetime,” Samir told us, explaining that financial services like Step require more commitment from customers than CPG products like Feastables.

EXCLUSIVE: This month Dhar Mann is hosting a two-day creator training camp with Adobe in Burbank, CA.

We hopped on a call with Mann to get the details → 

Over 200 creators will gather at Dhar Mann Studios’ 120K-square-foot campus to ideate, film, edit, and publish short-form video in real-time.

Creators including Jordan Matter, Adam W, Rebecca Zamolo, and Dad Social will provide mentorship and collaborate on content.

“We wanted to create this creator playground where we can invite aspiring and established creators to learn best practices from some of the experts in the industry,” Mann said.

Participants can rotate through 10 content stations led by experts in genres including comedy, cooking, beauty, and tech. For example, creators can learn about comedy content from Adam W and make videos with him on set. 

“These 200+ creators aren’t just there to learn—they’ll be creating content while there within 100+ standing sets,” Mann said. “We estimate to reach over 1 billion views across platforms just with the creators that will attend.”

Creators will be trained using Adobe products like Premiere, Firefly, and After Effects. These are products Mann has used to build Dhar Mann Studios over the last eight years, gaining a following of over 163 million across social platforms. 

Zoom out: The Adobe camp comes on the heels of several big partnerships for Mann, who recently inked a FAST channel partnership with Samsung and signed with Fox to produce 40 original microdramas. 

“Great storytelling is at the heart of everything—it’s what fuels the flywheel. For us, social-first content will always be that,” Mann said. “I always think as a YouTuber first, so I don't lose sight as to what got us here in the first place.”

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Starting in March, Discord is implementing age verification to all users globally, requiring some users to confirm their age through facial recognition or ID uploads. For reference, other platforms like YouTube limit age verification to certain countries. 

How it works:

Some users expressed concern over giving their personal information to Discord, as the company experienced a data breach in 2025—losing over 70K images of users’ IDs.

What creators are saying: