Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money

submited by

Style Pass

2025-01-07 20:30:08

Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money is a compilation of over 2800 clips from 206 Mr. Beast videos. This is the abridged 12 minute version—both this and the full length hour-long cut are also available on my YouTube and my website. The work is intended to distill the content of the most popular YouTuber in the world down to one of its core motifs: the promise of the next number being even bigger.

Mr. Beast, born as Jimmy Donaldson, tries to present himself as apolitical. But when you convince 4% of the world to hit the red Subscribe button, you get the politics for free. These clips are those politics. Donaldson has often explained that the over-the-top excesses of his content—both in conspicuous consumption and even more conspicuous philanthropy—enable him to snowball money and influence that he can then leverage to make even more positive change in the world.

This framing is overwhelming. Donaldson has been in the hot seat for allegations of worker safety violations, hawking moldy knock-off Lunchables, and exploiting the poor, disabled, and destitute for views. Nothing, however, can avoid getting subsumed by the bottom line. “Is Mr. Beast good?” quickly becomes a proxy for “Should Mr. Beast's videos exist?” and if there is anything Mr. Beast does well, it is documenting the size, appreciation, and impact of his content at an incomparable rate. To argue against Donaldson is to rebuke the planting of 20 million trees, wish 100 people remained blind, and contend that those homeless people should not, actually, have been given $10,000.