MrBeast

Submission 35,833

About

MrBeast is the YouTube handle of vlogger Jimmy Donaldson, known for creating videos in which he performs various stunts that often involve spending large amounts of money on donations and extravagant purchases.

History

On February 20th, 2012, the first video was uploaded to the MrBeast YouTube channel,^[1] featuring footage of a saw trap in the multiplayer game Minecraft (shown below).

On February 21st, 2018, a video in which Donaldson donates $30,000 to Twitch streamer Ninja was uploaded to the channel, gaining more than 30 million views and 43,000 comments in 11 months (shown below, left).On July 28th, Donaldson uploaded a video titled "Can 20,000 Magnets Catch A Bullet Mid Air?", which contained various experiments shooting bullets into rows of various objects (shown below, right). Within six months, the video received over 57 million views and 56,000 comments.

On October 26th, 2018, Donaldson uploaded a video titled "I Bought Every Billboard In My City For This," in which he purchases various billboards calling for viewers to subscribe to PewDiePie in the Great Subscriber War against T-Series (shown below). Within three months, the video accumulated upwards of 13.9 million views and 83,000 comments.

On November 25th, the MrBeast channel uploaded a video in which he says the word "PewDiePie" 100,000 times (shown below, left). Over the next two months, the video received more than 9.4 million views and 132,000 comments. On December 16th, Donaldson uploaded a video of himself donating $10,000 to PewDiePie (shown below, right).

Super Bowl Tweet

On January 25th, Donaldson tweeted "Make sure you guys watch the Super Bowl" before removing the post (shown below). The following day, the news site Dexerto^[2] published an article titled "MrBeast teases PewDiePie Super Bowl video in deleted Tweet."

Interviews

On January 2nd, 2019, YouTuber Caspar uploaded an interview with Donaldson titled "How Mr Beast Spends $500,000 Per Month" (shown below). Over the next several weeks, the video gained over 530,000 views and 900 comments.

Most-liked Video

Following the World Record Egg becoming the most-liked post on Instagram in early January 2019, MrBeast uploaded a video titled "Make This Video The Most Liked Video On YouTube" (shown below). Within five days, the video gathered upwards of 11.7 million views and 4.6 million likes, making it the 2nd most liked non-music video on the platform (shown below).

Imitator Pranks

On Twitch, there have been several instances of users pretending to be MrBeast convincing children to harm their gaming hardware by telling them if they did so, MrBeast would buy them new, better ones. The first instance of this occurred in late January of 2019,^[5] when a MrBeast impersonator convinced a young boy, Twitch user rogue07, to destroy his $1,200 PC on his stream with the promise he would buy him a $5,000 one (clip shown below). The boy, with the help of his mother, poured water on his PC, dunked it underwater, hit it with a machete, and eventually threw it out the window. In a series of since-deleted tweets, the boy's mother explained that she believed the legitimacy of the prank, writing, "As stupid as it looks to most of you- my son and his friends thought this was some guy they follow- it wasn’t. We screwed up his PC- and it’s up to mama to fix the situation. That’s it! No need for all the videos and awful comments."^[4] MrBeast refused to replace the boy's PC out of anxiety about starting a trend where people intentionally broke things to get him to replace it.^[8]

On June 23rd, a similar incident occurred to streamer jaidengggg, a young boy. A user named "not_mr_beast_6000" convinced the streamer to pour water onto his Xbox One with the promise of large donations. Additionally, the user and the chat convinced the child that the water created toxic fumes which were coming out of his Xbox and that he should evacuate his house and dial emergency services (shown below). A thread about the incident gained over 780 points on /r/LivestreamFail^[5] and was covered by the Daily Dot^[6] and Dexerto.^[7]

Criticism

On May 24th, 2018, The Atlantic^[3] published an article by journalist Taylor Lorenz titled "‘YouTube's Biggest Philanthropist’ Has a History of Homophobic Comments," which cited tweets and comments in which Donaldson used the word "fag."