Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has made his career off attention-seeking stunts. At 13, he was speedrunning every YouTube trend in an attempt to go viral: commentating on YouTube drama, making compilations of Minecraft and Call of Duty highlights, and estimating YouTubers’ net worth. He started blowing up due to a series called ‘worst intros’, where he compiled and made fun of YouTuber introductions. In January 2017, Donaldson went viral for counting to 100,000. It took him 44 hours.
After four years of trying, he figured out how to game the algorithm, and once he started, he didn’t stop. He kept doing stunts – he spun a fidget spinner for 24 hours, watched Jake Paul’s It’s Everyday Bro for ten hours, said ‘Logan Paul’ 100,000 times, and tested if 100,000 pieces of paper could stop a bullet. (It can. In fact, it doesn’t even take nearly that many.)
He’s offered people $100,000 to quit their job. He’s offered kids $100,000 to quit school (don’t worry, he said in the video he was actually only going to give them the money if they refused to quit). He put a cheque for a million dollars in a watermelon, hid it in a field full of watermelons, and told a man if he found the right one and smashed it, he could cash the cheque. He famously re-enacted Squid Game, the show where desperate people compete to the death for money – in his version, nobody died, but it was still in terrible taste.
What’s so disturbing about these videos is that Donaldson is still doing stunts – it’s just that now, other people are doing them for him. He got famous doing things that made him uncomfortable, pushed the bounds of what the human brain and body can tolerate, and now he’s outsourcing that to people in exchange for ludicrous amounts of money. It’s not out of morbid fascination with people’s limits based on his own experience, it’s for clicks.
He once said that after dropping out of college, he told his mother, “I’d rather be poor than do anything besides YouTube.” But he hasn’t had to choose – he’s gotten absolutely loaded making this content and optimising it for YouTube. I can’t imagine wanting so badly to be a YouTuber that I’d do this to other people – recognise that what I have is enough money to change someone’s life, and hold it over them so they’ll dance for the entertainment of millions of people on the internet. Perhaps it’s a result of growing up on the internet and seeing how rich and famous YouTubers at that time got, and wanting to emulate that. Donaldson is only 24 and, because of his videos, has already developed such a cult of personality around him thathis fans are going to supermarkets to fix displays of his chocolate bars. He got what he wanted, and then wanted more.
Combine all this with how Donaldson’sformer employees described a toxic work environment, his use of slurs on Twitter, his being on Joe Rogan’s podcast (which certainly indicates something about his values), and that most of his charitable donations are essentially tax write-offs, it’s clear Donaldson should not be lauded as a hero the way many of his fans think. Despite criticism, he refuses to acknowledge the ramifications of his work, claiming instead that people will always find a way to criticise him despite his generosity.
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