The Professional Idiots Are in Trouble

Jimmy Donaldson is one of the most popular entertainers in the world. Millennials know him as MrBeast, and for ten years, millions of us have haunted his YouTube channel, where he posts videos of insane, insanely expensive stunts with titles like I Gave $20,000 To Random Homeless People, or I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive. MrBeast is the most popular channel on YouTube (those videos have 47 million and 325 million views, respectively); if it were a country, it would have the fourth-largest population in the world. But mainstream media has always turned its nose up at MrBeast, if it bothers to cover him at all.

His whole thing is too capitalistic, too gauche, too much like trauma porn, the legacy press has long maintained. The New York Times has accused him of  “quasi philanthropy”; the prolific internet writer Taylor Lorenz argued that after Donaldson built 100 wells in Africa, “some vulnerable people” found his content to be “exploitative.” He was accused of ableism because he paid for 1,000 people to get cataract surgery so that they could see clearly for the first time.

So the 26-year-old—who is worth half a billion dollars—has always felt like an underdog, a boy in a suburban basement who’s constantly thinking “What if we. . . ” 

His early videos, like one where all he did was count to 100,000, have the same vibe as more recent ones, including one of him festooning a house with 1 million Christmas lights. But now, MrBeast has reached the tipping point that so many social media stars come to, where their fun, freewheeling thing crashes headfirst into the more formal entertainment establishment—leaving its creator in danger of becoming a victim of his own success.