In the past, I wrote an article in defence of Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, aptly titled “It’s time to stop hating MrBeast.”
After a year and a half, it’s safe to say that my opinion has changed.
It’s not hard to see why people would jump to Donaldson’s defence during moments of controversy. After all, how could anyone speak ill of a man who uses his self-built wealth to create modern-day miracles, changing thousands of lives through his monetary giveaways and philanthropic efforts?
Donaldson has built 100 wells in Africa to provide drinking water to malnourished communities, provided $30 million worth of free food to people in need and paid for the surgeries of 1,000 blind people so they could see again. There’s no way Donaldson could be a bad person, right?
Indeed, Donaldson’s philanthropic work has changed the lives of many people, and there’s no understating the positive impact he’s made on the world. What’s even more impressive is that his YouTube empire is largely self-built, with his MrBeast channel — which stands at 319 million subscribers as of writing — beginning with a 13-year-old Donaldson making awkward Minecraft- and Pokémon-based gameplay videos. His success is unprecedented and speaks to the knowledge of an individual who understands how to optimise content for the YouTube algorithm better than anyone else.
It’s just a shame he had to sell his soul to get there.
While Donaldson is undoubtedly a mastermind in terms of content creation, it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that he sees people as props to fuel his content-producing machine — props that can be used however he likes as long as he throws enough money at them.
YouTuber and former MrBeast employee dogpack404 recently embarked on an online campaign attempting to reveal the dark secrets behind Donaldson’s enormous company.
In his first video, dogpack404 alleges that the MrBeast company conducts illegal lotteries, rigs competitions, hires actors to pose as contestants in challenges, has merch supposedly signed by Donaldson actually signed by other employees and scripts portions of videos — things that would be a very bad look for a channel which prides itself on never faking content, a line Donaldson has repeated countless times.
Unfortunately for fans of the MrBeast channel, much of dogpack404’s evidence is quite damning.
Early in the video, dogpack404 alleges that new fan-favourite MrBeast contestant Mack isn’t just another random person, as Donaldson’s original video would lead you to believe. Using obscured public records, dogpack404 reveals that Mack actually moved to the city where MrBeast videos are filmed two months prior to that video’s release and says that was around the same time the “contestant” joined MrBeast’s editing team.
It’s pretty shady stuff, especially when Donaldson constantly advertises that you might be chosen to appear as a contestant in a future video simply by subscribing to his channel. Interestingly, he doesn’t advertise the fact that working at his company will net you a better chance of appearing in videos. But it doesn’t end there.
dogpack404 details that MrBeast occasionally rigs competitions to ensure they end in a certain way. For example, in MrBeast’s 2022 video “100 Boys Vs 100 Girls For $500,000,” dogpack404 alleges that the girls were repeatedly given advantages to ensure that their team came out on top, as a landslide victory for the boys’ team would result in a “PR problem,” according to text messages shown in the video.
These advantages included paying a skilled member of the boys’ team to drop out of the competition, giving the girls a drone so they could observe how many boys were left in the competition and filling the girls’ team with production members because there initially weren’t enough female contestants to run the competition.
If these accusations are true, they would severely damage Donaldson’s claims of “never faking videos,” which simply isn’t true if a competition’s winners are essentially predetermined.
dogpack404 reveals some of the psychological techniques employed in the creation of MrBeast videos, meant to keep viewers coming back for more content and purchasing the brand’s products.
Directly connected to this are the “illegal lotteries” that dogpack404 accuses MrBeast of holding. The accuser shows clips of a past MrBeast livestream intended to sell signed merchandise with shady behaviour throughout. In one portion, Donaldson promises to put $1,000 in one of the merch packages in 30 seconds but ends up putting the money in a package 14 seconds later, misleading viewers who had waited longer to purchase merchandise in hopes of winning the monetary prize.
“Almost everything that someone’s bought, we put something in their package,” Donaldson says with a chuckle during the livestream. However, this statement doesn’t line up with dogpack404’s deductive work which showed that viewers only had a 0.06% chance of winning something with their order.
It’s incredibly shady, and it’s hard to see this as anything other than Donaldson effectively trying to scam his audience into buying more merch with the false promise of inflated winning odds. Because his fame revolves around giving away money, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if many viewers believed Donaldson’s promises.
There’s a lot more in the video about Donaldson’s deceptive sales tactics, including several testimonies from winners who never received their prizes and the predatory lottery-esque marketing behind the MrBeast chocolate bar line. There are too many accusations to detail in full here, so it’s well worth watching dogpack404’s full video.
Some of the accusations in dogpack404’s second video are even more concerning. This video highlights the experiences of people who have been part of MrBeast videos, including overworked staff members who have slept in the office after working all night and alleged hospitalizations during Donaldson’s Olympics-themed video.
The most heart-wrenching part of dogpack404’s video was his interview with Jake Weddle, another former MrBeast employee. Weddle can be seen in MrBeast videos dating back to 2020.
During the interview, Weddle alleges that he experienced inhumane conditions while participating as a contestant in an unreleased MrBeast video. Weddle is visibly shaken during the interview, breaking down in tears as he recounts his experience.
During the challenge, Weddle needed to stay inside an enclosed room for 30 days to win $300,000 — a concept that would be marketed along the lines of “$10,000 for every day you spend in this room.”
When Weddle arrived in his solitary confinement chamber, he was greeted with the smell of paint fumes and cameras that would be monitoring him 24/7. Things got even worse for the contestant when he was informed that the bright lights would not be shut off for him, even when he tried to sleep, because fiddling with the lights would ruin a potential timelapse shot. Weddle was also not given a clock, so he never knew what time it was throughout the challenge.
Weddle says he currently suffers from issues related to insomnia and that he wouldn’t be surprised if these effects were triggered by his experience on the MrBeast set.
At one point in the challenge, Weddle was allegedly asked by the video’s director on behalf of Donaldson if he could look at the camera and describe how thankful he was for the money, given that he could now pay off his student loans — a line that Weddle says was very difficult to perform.
Later in the challenge, a mentally deteriorating Weddle was told by Donaldson that the day’s special challenge would be to run a marathon on a treadmill placed within the room. So, with more money waved in front of his face and pressure to perform, Weddle ran on the treadmill until 3 a.m. until his feet were covered in blisters and his muscles ached.
Weddle decided he was done and exited the challenge early. He walked away with over $100,000 to represent the number of days he’d spent in solitary confinement and the additional challenges he’d participated in, and due to its “haunting” nature, the video was never released.
Critics online have said that Weddle was overreacting and should have been aware that winning hundreds of thousands of dollars wouldn’t be easy. It’s fair to suggest that winning such a weighty monetary challenge shouldn’t be a walk in the park. But Weddle faced more than that. He didn’t just experience a difficult challenge — if what he says is true, he experienced borderline torture.
Near the end of the interview, Weddle made a particularly concerning allegation toward the MrBeast company, saying that Donaldson had knowingly hired a registered sex offender, who has a history of pedophilia, to work on the MrBeast team in the past. As if this weren’t already bad enough, it’s important to remember that Donaldson’s YouTube channel largely appeals to children, making this situation feel exponentially slimier. While Weddle says the employee has since been let go, it’s an accusation that simply can’t be ignored.
Unfortunately for Donaldson’s carefully protected public image, the controversies didn’t end there.
Earlier this year, it was reported that Donaldson had reached an agreement with Amazon to produce a MrBeast game show, called “Beast Games,” for Amazon Prime Video. The series promised to be the largest game show in history, with 1,000 contestants competing for a $5 million prize. Amazon gave Donaldson and his production team complete control over the project, and the budget for Beast Games is reported to be $100 million. Filming for the project began in the summer.
It has been a complete disaster.
Several contestants and crew members who worked on Beast Games have levied concerning accusations against the MrBeast company. These accusations include several injuries and hospitalizations (including a piece of a tower falling on a crew member), medications being withheld from contestants and sexual harassment experienced by female contestants on set. Contestants were also misled about the number of contestants that would be competing in the first challenge, which featured 2,000 contestants rather than the 1,000 that players were led to believe.
The accusations culminated in a class-action lawsuit against MrBeast and Amazon, with contestants citing “chronic mistreatment,” sexual harassment on set and dangerous conditions for contestants for their case.
“While participants knew upon signing the contract at the production’s inception that they were facing a potentially long and challenging competition, they allege getting a lot more than they bargained for,” attorneys for the contestants said in a statement, according to Variety. “Several contestants ending up hospitalized, while others reported suffering physical and mental complications while being subjected to chronic mistreatment, degradation and, for the female contestants, hostile working conditions.”
Looking back at Donaldson’s career, seeing his current trajectory is incredibly surprising, yet somehow not surprising whatsoever. He’s seen human beings as props for years — things to be used and abused for content, rather than living things worthy of respect and empathy.
What Donaldson has discovered is that all he needs to do is throw enough money at a person, and they’ll dance for him. He’s learned that people have a price, and once he’s promised them a crumb of his fortune, he can use them to create what he believes to be the best content possible.
The sad truth is that it’s never been about helping people. For Donaldson, it’s always been about growth, and the people he’s helped along the way were simply tools he needed to get bigger.
There’s an interesting case to be made that perhaps Donaldson’s positive impact on the world outweighs the negative effects he’s had on his workers and contestants. Indeed, I also believed that Donaldson’s good deeds made him immune to criticism when I wrote my original piece on MrBeast over a year ago:
“…while it would certainly be noble for Donaldson to pay for 1,000 surgeries without global viewership, it means that he would not be able to help as many people in the future. If having cameras roll is the price to pay in order to provide help to tens of thousands of people, so be it. I would rather these people get the support that they need with cameras on, than not get the support at all.”
It’s undeniable that Donaldson has done good things in the world. There are likely many people out there who are incredibly thankful to him for the changes he’s made to their lives. But over the last year, it’s become increasingly clear that Donaldson’s intentions are entirely self-motivated, and he’s willing to turn human beings into his lab rats if it means he gets to experience greater success.
Jimmy Donaldson has done a lot of good things, but that doesn’t mean he’s a good person.