In the eighth episode of the reality competition show “Beast Games,” released last week, the YouTube superstar MrBeast — the show’s host, co-executive producer and mischief-maker-in-chief — asked the 10 remaining contestants to choose their share of a $1 million split.
By this stage of “Beast Games,” which streams on Amazon Prime Video, there was a surprising amount of good will and trust among the players, who are all competing to be the lone winner of a $5 million prize in next week’s finale, the largest amount ever given away on television.
The money was presented in a preposterous stack of bills, an almost cartoonlike array. The first contestant took one-tenth. The second took a little more. The third contestant to stake a claim was J.C., a man with a sob-story background who had previously appeared to be beyond ethical reproach. But the combination of quite reasonable greed and quite tragic desperation led him to take $650,000 for himself, leaving barely anything for the remaining players, to their collective repugnance.
The subsequent shots of J.C., alone in his bunk, weeping and surrounded by duffel bags of cash, was the first truly affecting note of this season. He was a villain, but a completely reasonable one. Resources are scarce, competition is everywhere — all you can do is grab what’s in front of you.
Typically, the YouTube videos for which MrBeast, born Jimmy Donaldson, is known steer clear of such psychic weight. He is 26, and has been the dominant star on YouTube for several years now, with 357 million subscribers. His stunt videos, in which people are prompted to do extreme tasks for money, are often viewed hundreds of millions of times.
These videos — a recent one challenged two strangers to live for 100 days in an underground bunker for a $500,000 prize — are turned-up-to-11 intense, carefully plotted and presented with an air of cheeky amateurism, making them addictive to watch. His content is optimized for viewer retention, with barely a minute going by without something startling happening. Like much of the most scalable social media content — Khaby Lame’s silent slapstick TikToks are the closest analogues — MrBeast videos don’t require language to be effective.
Largely, though, his interest is in how people behave, not the people themselves. But there are indications that his motivations are evolving — onscreen, he’s reckoning more with the implications of what money means, especially for those who lack it; and off camera, he’s speaking more openly about money’s corrupting power, especially for those who have a lot of it.
In a recent interview with the YouTube host Theo Von, Von pressed him for a psychological explanation for his instinct to help people. MrBeast was at a loss: “I should come up with this heart-throbbing story of, like, I just want to help people because I couldn’t when I was young. But the honest truth is I know how to make content go viral, we are really good at making good content, and I just believe a world where I help people is just more fun than a world where I don’t.”
In other words, charity simply makes excellent and optimized YouTube content even more excellent and optimized.
“Beast Games” isn’t intended as a charitable program, but the show’s real through line — more so than the multimillion dollar sets and the multimillion dollar prizes, including a private island — is just how many people are willing to submit themselves to abjection and embarrassment for a flicker of a chance of success. J.C.’s decision underscored the unspoken sadness lurking just beneath the surface of the show, which began with 1,000 contestants who throughout are referred to almost exclusively by their jersey number, not by name. It is the ne plus ultra of online NPC (nonplayer character) culture — the show needs bodies, and it relies on their fundamental anonymity in order to execute its grand gestures.
In August, The New York Times reported on grim conditions at the “Beast Games” audition episode, in which 2,000 contestants were cut down to 1,000. (That video appeared on MrBeast’s YouTube channel, not Amazon Prime Video.) Not long after those allegations came out, MrBeast was filming the first episode of “Beast Games” in Canada, and for a few days was followed around by Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, who cover the creator economy on their Colin and Samir YouTube channel. At one point, MrBeast and Samir are having a quiet conversation.
“Do you think I’m evil?” he asks Samir.
“No, I don’t think you’re evil,” Samir replies. “I think you’re different.”
By at least one metric, “Beast Games” is a success — as of mid January, it is Amazon’s biggest unscripted show ever, with 50 million unique viewers, demonstrating that a YouTuber can succeed with a game show on a major streaming service. But the bigger question is can major streaming services (or cable and linear television networks) adapt programming to resemble the content created on YouTube and short form video apps, which is nurturing the next generation of viewers. MrBeast has said that “Beast Games” cost over $100 million to make, a number likely made possible by Amazon subscriber revenue. But in five to 10 years, a generation of young people fully raised on free internet content may or may not be willing to pay, an existential concern of form and resources for companies like Amazon.
For now, though, MrBeast is learning which parts of his formula translate from single-serving videos to serialized series. A successful YouTube video is about the scale and improbability of the stunt, but he now speaks in interviews about wanting to develop characters — in essence, to put a human face to the big-bucks game-show philanthropy.
“Beast Games,” which tosses money around glibly and balances the cutthroat and the benevolent, isn’t quite there. The show’s exclamatory approach contributes to a feeling, lately ubiquitous online, that money is more or less seen as fake, or something that can be conjured easily, be it by creative viral content, or by getting lucky with crypto, or some combination of both.
And yet the dedication and risk tolerance of the thousands of people who signed up to participate in Beast Games demonstrates that money is quite real. And if anything, the casual callousness of the “Beast Games” setup is at odds with MrBeast’s philanthropic urges.
Several times recently, in interviews and on social media, MrBeast has pointed to the work he’s done to remove children from the labor pool in West Africa, where the cocoa for his Feastables line of chocolate bars is sourced.
And in his social media, there’s an emergent class consciousness that suggests that he understands that the people who participate in his videos, and presumably the people at home watching them, are individuals with wants and needs — and that he may be the only person capable of connecting them with resources.
A handful of his YouTube videos are purely charitable — in a recent one, he partnered with aid organizations around the world to procure prosthetic legs for 2,000 people who could not otherwise afford them. His impulse to gamify the aid persisted, though: “You came in with one leg, and now you’re leaving with two and a briefcase full of money,” he awkwardly told one recipient. MrBeast also operates a second YouTube channel, Beast Philanthropy, with a comparatively modest 27 million subscribers.
After that giveaway, he posted on X that “it feels so disgusting that in a country with this much wealth, a [expletive] YouTuber is their only option to get a prosthetic leg.”
Money has been weighing on him. He posted about wanting to partner with a billionaire to put together an offer to buy TikTok, and not long after, posted about wanting to find a philanthropically-inclined wealthy person to help with a charity video: “Dear ultra rich people on X, I’ve been working on a video where we feed people in need globally and if any of you wouldn’t mind donating a million dollars to help us feed more people that’d mean the world to me!”
MrBeast was instead presented with a valuable lesson on the true cost of a dollar, posting later that day, “It is funny that when I say I’m buying TT I get unfathomable amount of messages from the ultra wealthy but when I fund raise it’s crickets.” Turns out the whole world is “Beast Games,” and behind almost every dollar is someone holding it tight.
The post What’s Next for MrBeast? Class Consciousness. appeared first on New York Times.
