4 APRIL 30-MAY 6, 2026 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Are You Watching? HOW MATTHEW BEEM BECAME COLORADO’S BIGGEST YOUTUBE STAR. BY HANNAH METZGER Matthew Beem drove toward North Carolina with a video camera and a pink-and-blue Smart car covered in giant French fries. He didn’t know exactly where he was going. He didn’t have an address or even a city in mind. But he knew who he was looking for: YouTube star MrBeast. Over a decade into his own YouTube career, Beem had little to show for it. The Colorado Springs native had been posting videos religiously since he was thir- teen. After graduating from Mesa Ridge High School in 2015, Beem didn’t go to college, choosing instead to work at his father’s auto-body repair shop, washing cars and cleaning toilets to fund his video shoots. He tried doing Call of Duty gaming montages, sneaker reviews, eating challenges, vlogs. Nothing seemed to land. By 2021, Beem had around 17,000 sub- scribers and was averaging just 200 views per video. That’s when he took his biggest gamble yet: Using his savings and a $14,000 loan, he bought a car and customized it to advertise MrBeast’s burger brand. Without an invitation or permission, Beem embarked on the 1,700-mile journey from Colorado to MrBeast’s home, hoping to gift him the car in exchange for letting Beem fi lm the encounter. “People thought I was crazy, and they were right,” Beem says. “It was crazy. It is crazy. It’s not something I recommend, but I believed in it because I did the research, and I knew YouTube. I knew what I was doing. I just needed my moment.” The gamble paid off. MrBeast agreed to meet with Beem after he sent a photo of the car to one of MrBeast’s producers, when Beem was over halfway to North Carolina. While the resulting video didn’t immediately go viral, the experience unlocked the formula for Beem’s future success. He continued collaborating with MrBeast (now the most popular YouTuber of all time) and began giving custom-built gifts to other major YouTubers, including repeating the car stunt with Logan Paul (and racking up another loan, this time for $20,000). Beem’s YouTube channel reached one mil- lion subscribers in 2022, just six months after he posted the video of his fateful road trip. Today, the 29-year-old is the biggest You- Tuber in Colorado, with more than eight million subscribers and nearly 1.5 billion cumulative views. He still runs the content operation out of Colorado Springs, in a large warehouse with over a dozen full-time, in- house employees. “A lot of people give up on things super easily, especially social media. They post one picture and expect it to go viral,” Beem says. “Nobody was born to do this. You have to work extremely hard. ...And I work ex- tremely hard.” The warehouse decor tells the story of his achievements. In the bathroom hangs a plaque from the World Record Academy for the eleven-foot-tall ice cream cone Beem built for a video. His desk houses boxing gloves signed by Mike Tyson and a basketball signed by Nikola Jokic from his collabora- tions with the famous athletes. Countless treasures crowd the shelves in the lobby, including a gifted mixtape from the DJ Marshmello, a Funko Pop made in Beem’s likeness and personalized Coke bottles cel- ebrating when his channel reached five million subscribers. Beem’s view-count milestones are proudly displayed on the wall: one million views for a video building a massive Mine- craft statue, ten million views for a video creating Squid Game props for MrBeast and 100 million views for a video fi lling a house with water to make a giant fi sh tank. But the name plate on his offi ce door reads “Matthew A. Beem: painter,” a souve- nir from his days at the now-closed Beem’s Collision auto shop. In addition to the framed articles reporting on his YouTube exploits is a local newspaper feature on the shop from 2017, with a front-page photo of Beem repairing a hail-damaged vehicle. “I pinch myself all the time,” Beem says. Passion Project Beem says he reads all of his hate comments. Not for masochism, but for research. He approaches the production like a science. Every comment is a data point providing insight into how to improve his videos. When commenters speculated that YouTuber Airrack was hiding in Beem’s videos, Beem placed his disguised team members in the background of shoots to encourage engagement. As YouTube’s tele- vision viewership has increased, Beem has begun optimizing his content for larger screens. For a recent thirty-minute video, Beem says his team recorded 100 hours of footage, edited eighteen versions, and left 1,200 revision notes. “There’s nothing inside of Matthew Beem that makes him a special YouTuber,” he says. “In any industry, whoever practices the most and has the most reps will be successful.” That mentality carried Beem through the years of stagnation. He recalls the mother of a close friend telling him to stop hanging out with Beem because his YouTube aspira- tions were a “bad infl uence.” He remembers his sister, Cheyanne, being made fun of by classmates for helping fi lm videos that got just twenty views. Even after his channel began to pick up steam, he was mocked for going into debt to give online celebrities free cars while he was still living in his mom’s basement. “I’m really happy that it took me so long, because I was ready for the moment,” Beem says. “When my friends were in their fresh- man year of college, no one was asking them, ‘Hey, why aren’t you a doctor yet?’ It takes time, obviously. If I was going to be one of the best YouTubers in the world, it was going to take time. Uploading was my schooling.” Beem has always taken his craft that se- riously. Even at fourteen, during his Call of Duty phase, Beem says he hired an editor for his videos and spent NEWS continued on page 6 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS “There’s nothing inside of Matthew Beem that makes him a special YouTuber,” he says. BEEM TEAM
