‘I have negative money right now’: MrBeast and Mark Cuban say billionaires are more broke than you think

The YouTuber is worth approximately $2.6 billion; much of that comes from equity in his $5 billion company, Beast Industries.

“Technically, everyone watching this video has more money than me in their bank account if you subtract the equity value of my company, which doesn’t buy me McDonald’s in the morning,” said Donaldson in the WSJ interview.

His situation might be more common than you think. Many billionaires are cash poor because they have their wealth tied up in illiquid assets, such as stocks and real estate.

Here’s why it’s so common for billionaires to be illiquid — and how their situation is different from other “cash-poor” Americans.

Billionaires ‘might have 5%’ of their wealth in liquid assets if they’re ‘lucky,’ says Cuban

Mark Cuban, who Bloomberg reports has a net worth of over $10 billion, appeared on a recent episode of the podcast Pivot to talk about how liquid billionaires really are in light of a proposed one-time 5% billionaire tax in California.

“People don’t realize that a billionaire doesn’t mean you have a billion dollars in liquid assets,” said Cuban to cohost Kara Swisher. “Chances are, you might have 5%, if you’re lucky.”

That would leave a billionaire with around $50 million in liquid assets — certainly enough to cover almost anything they’d need, and certainly more than the sub-$1 million Donaldson claims to keep for himself.

But Cuban says that many billionaires don’t keep even 5% of their net worth in liquid assets.

“Every situation is different. But I can tell you that the day I became a billionaire I didn’t have anywhere close to 5 [percent] in cash,” said Cuban in an email to Moneywise. “Most entrepreneurs let their winners ride. Meaning [if] business is good, they will keep on investing, at the expense of their liquidity.”

For those billionaires, they might find the vast majority of their on-paper wealth tied up in their own company’s stock. Selling some of those stocks could cause their company’s stock price to go down in response.

No matter where their wealth is, billionaires aren’t actually dealing with the same things regular cash-poor Americans do

Billionaires’ illiquidity could become a problem for them if this 5% billionaire tax passes, even if their illiquid wealth helps them avoid taxes in other situations.

But make no mistake — even cash-poor billionaires aren’t struggling to pay for emergencies, like car trouble or a medical procedure. The same isn’t true for most cash-poor Americans.

SoLo Funds’ 2026 Cash Poor Report found that, of Americans who lived paycheck-to-paycheck, over 70% had to use short-term borrowing to pay for an unplanned expense. While illiquid billionaires can borrow against their stocks, regular Americans have to resort to using credit cards, BNPL, payday loans, or other high-APR loans to cover emergencies.