MrBeast has a new game: work for Beast Industries without stealing company secrets. According to Jimmy Donaldson (better known as MrBeast) and his company, a former employee failed the challenge. In a complaint first spotted by Polygon, MrBeast is suing a former contractor for allegedly breaching his contract, stealing trade secrets, and—certainly the most creepy of the accusations—installing hidden cameras throughout the company offices.
The alleged culprit at the heart of the complaint is Leroy Nabors, an IT contractor who was brought on in 2023 to work on the Beast Industries IT network. He allegedly started working on servers that “housed post-production Beast content” and he subcontracted out some of the tasks to Vine Networks, an IT company managed by Nabors’ daughter. That apparently went well, as Nabors was moved to a “special projects” team in late 2023 as a full employee, working with the company’s development department tasked with handling “content production,” “fundraising,” and “political advocacy”—all work that was outside of the IT tasks that he was initially brought in to do. Nabors worked on that team until October 1, 2024, when he was fired according to the complaint.
After Nabors was fired (the complaint doesn’t go into the details as to the why of that termination), Beast Industries discovered that they had allegedly downloaded “more than one thousand Beast confidential files from the Company’s Google Vault,” including documents that the company claims were “highly confidential” and contained information about “business strategy, financial information, capitalization tables, financing documents, individual employee personal information, and other MrBeast intellectual property.” Nabors allegedly downloaded those files on September 23, 2024—just over a week before he was let go—because he sensed that his firing was coming.
In addition to discovering the documents had been downloaded, Beast personnel apparently also spotted cameras installed around the office after Nabors’ departure. According to the complaint, Nabors was “well-known among colleagues to surreptitiously record meetings.” The complaint accuses Nabors of installing and operating the cameras.
Nabors and his daughter have an interesting history. A 2022 lawsuit alleged that he “diverted millions of dollars in revenue and profits” from Edu-Net, an IT company he started, to HSC Solutions, a competing company run by his daughter.
But things have been getting mighty litigious in the MrBeast universe lately, too. Donaldson and his company were sued last year by contestants on his Amazon show Beast Games for sexual harassment and chronic mistreatment. A former employee of MrBeast also published a video in 2024 calling the biggest YouTuber around a “sociopath,” which led to Donaldson lawyering up and filing a cease-and-desist.
