A kid from North Carolina; a varsity baseball and basketball player, plans to donate 500 thousand dollars to strangers.

The catch?

Stay in a bland, white room for 100 days– 2400 hours, and if one of you leaves, you both lose. 

“We are three months away from Mr. Beast conducting the Stanford prison experiment.” Twitter user @judson said. 

Whether or not the internet goliath Mr. Beast is going to go through with this sadistic seeming idea, doesn’t excuse the questions raised in response. 

Mr. Beast, or Jimmy Donaldson is one of the fastest-growing YouTubers on the YouTube platform, and a lot of his success has come from his large spendings and giveaways to strangers. 

One of his earliest hits on the platform came from his giveaway to a homeless man, a staggering 10,000 dollars from the then 19-year-old. 

“Shoving a camera in his face the whole time just didn’t seem genuine,” Donaldson said. “I just wanted to treat him like a normal person.”

Donaldson, in recent years, has been putting people into interesting social experiments all for the reward of enormous amounts of money. Some such titles include, “Offering People $100,000 To Quit Their Job,” and “Survive 100 Days in Circle, Win $500,000.” 

However, Donaldson’s money isn’t just limited to flashy titles for his main YouTube channel, but rather, he started a philanthropic channel late 2020. The 30 featured videos on the channel range from donating millions of dollars to Ukrainian refugees to providing prosthetics to over 2000 amputees. 

“As a kid who’s dad has a prosthetic leg, this is seriously awesome to watch. I showed this video to him and he started crying,” one commenter described. “Thanks for everything you do man, you’re seriously insane.” 

All of this positive feedback from his giveaways has mostly kept him out of hot water. His video, “Survive 100 Days in Circle, Win $500,000,” featured a random subscriber who spent those days away from his family.

“You know you’ve been here a long time when living inside a circle in a Mr. Beast video seems normal,” the subscriber said. “I kept waking up thinking I was home, [I’m] really missing my family.” 

Despite the hard task in front of him, the man persevered. With such a difficult challenge, many people expressed their sympathy.

“This man is willing to do anything to make his family happy,” a commenter said. “The dads out there are underrated.” 

However, does his positive influence on the world overall outweigh the negative impacts his brand provides to others? With the illusion of large amounts of money just out of reach; life changing amounts. 

It’s nearly impossible to understand how much money has truly gone into all of his videos, and what he’s given away. However, two of his largest projects, Team Seas and Team Trees have donated nearly sixty million dollars to their respective foundations. 

The idea of planting a tree or taking a pound of trash out of the ocean for each dollar donated to the foundations, is no doubt helpful towards pathing a better path for the future generation.

But, everyone can formulate their own opinions on Donaldson, and in my eyes, shelling out millions of dollars to random contestants; amounts of money that can change hundreds of lives, can be careless, and dangerous. 

I believe he has no ill intent, but if he’s always been chasing the bigger number, he’s bound to make some reckless decisions. 

“If I don’t have a million subscribers when you see this video,” Donaldson said in a video published to himself in five years. “My entire life has been a failure.”

Edit (11/06/23): After reviewing this article, I’ve realized that my message is not completely clear. I do not personally support Mr. Beast’s brand as a whole, and personally see it as more harmful than good in the greater scheme of YouTube content creation. This plays further into Mr. Beast and his philanthropy channel, and only undermines his previous work by showing that he focuses on the larger numbers. Everyone is free to their own opinion, and just thought I should clear some things up.