James Bowen

MrBeast hid GoPros in random Walmarts so he could watch why his Feastables bars kept breaking on the shelves. Hershey has been making chocolate for 132 years and never had to. The standard CPG playbook for "why are bars arriving broken" runs through five layers. Call the distributor. Ask the Walmart buyer. Run a packaging stress test. Pull the returns data. Send a regional manager to spot-check three stores. Every layer aggregates. None of them show what an actual seven-year-old does to a bar at the moment they yank it off the bottom row of an endcap. The Bezos parallel is exact. He once called Amazon customer service in a leadership meeting and timed it himself. The dashboard said 60 seconds. The actual wait was 10 minutes. The GoPro tape reveals the same kind of gap. Whatever was breaking the bars wasn't in any spreadsheet, because no spreadsheet captures customer hands. Now look at the result. Feastables went from zero in January 2022 to $33M (2022), $96M (2023), $251M (2024), and a projected $520M in 2025. Per the Bloomberg numbers Beast Industries pitched investors, the chocolate bar earned $20M in profit in 2024. The same year, MrBeast's media empire (YouTube channels plus Beast Games on Amazon) pulled $246M and lost $80M. The kid who hides GoPros on Walmart shelves to watch his own bars is now the only profitable division of his own company. Hershey owns roughly 35% of the US chocolate market. Together with Mars they run over 60% of it. A century of distribution data, hundreds of category managers, top-shelf endcap deals at every retailer in the country. They had every other source of truth. MrBeast had nothing. So he watched. The chocolate bar is paying for the videos.

🇮🇶🇸🇾 Iraqi oil tankers loaded with crude are pouring into Syria right now through the AlYarubiyah crossing in AlHasakah countryside. Crossing just reopened after 13 years shut and yesterday Iraq sent the first official convoy of 70 tankers. This is Iraq’s workaround: using Syria as a land bridge to the Mediterranean to dodge the messy Strait of Hormuz chaos. Long convoys, real money for both sides, and a whole new route lighting up. Source: Anadolu

🚨 BREAKING CHINA’S REAL ESTATE MARKET JUST CRASHED TO A 20-YEAR LOW, LOSING A 1/4 OF ITS VALUE. SOMETHING EXTREMELY BAD IS HAPPENING…

If I should pass away tonight, here’s the culprit. 💀🦫☠️

JUST IN: U.S. Navy sailor assigned to minesweeping ship bound for the Hormuz Strait medically evacuated to home port after he was scratched by a monkey in Thailand.