Around 67 hours before filming began on Beast Games, his now-blockbusting reality competition series for Amazon Prime Video, the YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, sank down deep into an ergonomic chair in an office somewhere near the soundstage and hauled his legs on to a set of metal drawers. He looked beat. “I gotta figure out what we’re doing,” he said to Samir Chaudry, a fellow streamer who was documenting the making of the show.
It was early August 2024 and the New York Times had just run an exposé of the allegedly dire conditions endured by the programme’s aspiring contestants during its “audition” round, in which they were whittled down in number from 2,000 to 1,000. The publication of the report was badly timed news for Donaldson – and the crisis would only snowball in the following weeks. On 16 September, five of the aggrieved participants filed a class-action lawsuit against the show’s makers, accusing them of the negligent infliction of emotional distress, a failure to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment from occurring, and more. (The case is ongoing, and Donaldson has tweeted that the on-set problems were “blown out of proportion”.)
In the near-empty office, Donaldson crossed his legs and looked up at Chaudry with a scolded schoolboy’s grin. “Do you think I’m evil?” he asked. “No, I don’t think you’re evil,” Chaudry replied. “I think you’re different.”
The 26-year-old Donaldson is one of the world’s biggest stars. The North Carolina-based entrepreneur and content creator has 360 million subscribers on YouTube, six times the number of Taylor Swift’s followers on the platform. He has several hundred employees in his production team and a couple hundred more working for his chocolate company, Feastables. His efficient, sophisticated videos – mostly showing him and his friends blowing stuff up and/or engaging in high-jinks such as surviving in a cave for a week or mooching around in an abandoned Croatian resort – reportedly bring in between $600m and $700m a year in revenue. Such is the popularity of his work that, when he appeared on the cover of Time last February, the magazine’s description of him as “the most watched person in the world” carried no sense of hyperbole. It was a statement of fact. Donaldson told Time that, by his own estimation, his face appeared on a screen somewhere in the world about 30 billion times a year. Media reports suggest that he is, or is on course to be, a billionaire.
His extreme personal wealth and power make Beast Games’s concept particularly distasteful to many: cash-strapped working-class contestants humiliating themselves in the hope of winning the $5m prize money, which is displayed in a vulgar pile right on the set. “Everyone has a price!” Donaldson yells in the show, pitting participants against each other as they submit themselves to Squid Game-inspired challenges. “It exists solely to show us the worst of the human condition,” wrote one reviewer; “Donaldson’s garishly indulgent programme will serve as a fossil record of the greed, narcissism, self-destructive factionalism and worship of aggro-capitalism that has brought us our second helping of Trump,” wrote another.
But Beast Games, which concludes this week, has reached number one on Amazon’s streaming charts in more than 80 countries for a reason. It’s fun. It’s knowingly outrageous. I watch it on the weekends with my seven-year-old son, Kurt, who is a committed Donaldson fan: he draws pictures of the pink-and-blue MrBeast logo at after-school club and once forced me to upload an illustration that he did of a Star Wars Mandalorian holding a Feastables bar on to my Twitter feed, @-ing Donaldson. (No reply so far.) One thing that evidently eluded many of the Amazon show’s critics which Kurt immediately perceived was that it’s… just a game show. Every contestant is there to become the sole winner of that money mountain. Despite their oft-repeated claims they’re not there for the spoils, they literally are. For them to work together and somehow try to share the prize would be like contestants on Blind Date suggesting a foursome.
Kurt and his friends at school admire MrBeast primarily for his (click-generating) films showing his good deeds, such as installing a solar array to supply electricity to a rural village in Zambia or giving 2,000 amputees prosthetics they otherwise couldn’t afford. His African philanthropy has resulted in accusations of a white-saviour complex, and it’s true that, say, building wells in drought-stricken towns is a short-term solution that ultimately fails to address systemic issues. But he’s a YouTuber, not a politician, and I’d rather cheer on his efforts to do something positive with his vast wealth than shame him for not fixing the entire world single-handedly. And dunking on Donaldson is a tiresome journalistic genre. Unlike many big corporations that try to charity-wash their bad reputations, Donaldson doesn’t seem to have actually done anything that egregious to begin with.
After his YouTube co-host Ava Kris Tyson’s gender transition in 2023, Donaldson, to the dismay of transphobes and sundry conservatives, dismissed calls to distance himself from his long-time friend as “absurd”. (Tyson eventually quit the team following sexual misconduct allegations, including grooming a minor which even the supposed victim dismissed as “completely false”.) MrBeast is clearly not evil. As the boss of Feastables, he has campaigned to eliminate child labour from the chocolate-industry supply chain. If he’s made big mistakes – if that class-action lawsuit wins, say – I like to think he would do what he could to redress any harm he has caused. The New York Times report has already led to a shake-up of his team’s corporate structure; his ragtag band of collaborators are now apparently supplied with an employees’ code of conduct handbook, like in a grown-up company.
Watch his YouTube videos and you’ll see that Donaldson is just a nervous kid who only really knows content creation and craves approbation for doing well and doing right. He’s learning in real time. At the end of his amputees video, he took the hitherto uncharacteristic step of speaking directly to the camera about his anger at the US insurance industry, which denies people the resources and treatment they need. I found this somewhat moving because his demeanour suggested that he had only then realised the depravity of the system that he has thrived in. Why make a villain out of a guy who’s simply muddling through, figuring stuff out? As Chaudry said, he’s different.
[See also: Bridget Jones after Mr Darcy]
Content from our partners
Related
