Why MrBeast Philanthropy Will Never Save The World
Mr Beast has cured a thousand people of blindness, built a hundred homes for low-income families across the American continent, removed 33 million pounds of trash from the ocean, planted 20 million trees, and done much, much more. He might seem like a real-life superhero, using his wealth and access to make the world a better place. But the harsh truth is that Beast philanthropy will never save the world because of one fundamental flaw in his way of giving.
In 2023, Jimmy Donaldson, also known as Mr. Beast, spent $5 million to help 1,000 people with curable blindness see again. At face value, this seems like a bold and selfless act of charity, but things get a little unclear when you add more details. Everything was filmed, from interviews with the surgeon to the surgery and the enormous gratitude of the patients after the procedure was done. Today, the video sits at over 200 million views on YouTube, and he's turned performing acts of charity into a content-creating machine. While some are put off by Donaldson's approach to giving, hundreds of millions of viewers enjoy the spectacle.
Mr. Beast is the number one YouTuber in the world. Regardless of any complex feelings attached to him, Jimmy has helped many more people fulfill their fundamental needs on his YouTube channel and has even created a charity, the exclusive channel called Beast philanthropy. But will his approach to philanthropy inspire others and ultimately make the world a better place? I don't think so, and I'll explain why.
Jimmy's YouTube channel and his associated businesses generate over $700 million in revenue yearly. However, if you've watched his channel, you'd know that he puts a lot of money back into making more videos. Most of the production costs are tied up in charitable activities, like donating $30 million worth of food or buying a hundred homes and giving them away. According to Donaldson, he puts all the revenue from YouTube ads, merchandise, and sponsorships back into the channel. He's also boldly stated that he plans to die with zero in his bank account.
Mr. Beast is very successful, both as a philanthropic revenue generator and as a YouTube channel drawing in subscribers. Now, typically, philanthropy isn't exactly exciting. It's dry work that involves charity organizations asking for donations in many different ways and distributing resources in a calculated fashion. The most exciting format before Mr. Beast was probably the old-school telethon where performers and celebrities entertained us for a cause. Now, some have claimed that Mr. Beast continues this trend in providing entertainment for the sake of charity, but with Donaldson's approach, there's a very important difference.
Before Mr. Beast, the entertainment and cause were largely kept separate. Donaldson collapses this barrier, making charity the entertainment itself. When we watch his videos, we're drawn to the acts of charity being committed before our eyes. We see a surprising display of kindness that you would just never see in your ordinary life. Then we get the reaction from the beneficiary. Just like in the prank videos, the most value comes from how surprised people react. The gift is the setup, and the reaction is the true payoff.
As viewers, some of the joy the beneficiaries express spreads to us. Psychologists refer to this as emotional contagion—it's where you catch the emotions of others and replicate them ourselves. When you watch Mr. Beast videos, even the cynical among us can't help but smile when somebody's life has changed. In the video where Donaldson pays for surgery to cure blindness, it's almost impossible not to feel some of the joy that the patients are experiencing when they can see clearly again for the first time in years.
But it's not just these reactions that we're responding to. We're replicating the feelings of Jimmy himself. Giving to others in need feels good. By giving to others, you can actually get a "helpers high," which is when endorphins are released from the brain's reward center. This can improve your self-esteem, ease stress, and lower your blood pressure. We might not get the full effect that he feels just by watching his videos, but enough of it rubs off on us to keep joyfully watching.
Now, unlike many other YouTube channels, Mr. Beast has a hook that speaks of something other than our desire to be entertained. When we watch his videos, we're literally supporting his charity. Your view generates more ad revenue, which goes to more charitable causes, and he repeatedly emphasizes this point to make sure you're very aware that your view is the equivalent of a donation. You get both the entertainment value and the opportunity to feel benevolent while wasting time on YouTube. It's an impressive angle, you have to admit. It's philanthropy without any sacrifice on your part; you're only giving up time.
And that's where you're being exposed to content that's carefully designed to keep you glued to your screen. Mr. Beast doesn't just rely on his philanthropy format to hook you. With years of studying successful YouTube videos and creating challenge-focused content, he knows how to put together compelling entertainment. His astronomical view counts are often the result of retention editing—a process that removes any pauses where viewers might find their attention waning. The style of editing also features nauseating fast cuts, loud sounds, and flashy effects. After he releases a video, his team looks at metrics to see where people are dropping off and makes even further edits.
The style of editing might be on the way out, though. Even Jimmy himself is encouraging other creators to let their videos breathe and be longer. The slot-machine approach to content is starting to wear on the general YouTube and TikTok audience. Mr. Beast seems to have successfully moved on from the retention editing style he created to a more patient and relaxed one, even though still fast-paced.
So what does Jimmy Donaldson gain from this model when he has obliged himself to give all his earnings away? His videos didn't start out as philanthropic stunts. He made a variety of content, including a challenge video in which he counted to 10,000 in one take. Before his first sponsorship, he gave large gifts to his family, who were unknowingly part of his pranks. In one video, he filled his brother's home with slime and then gave him a new one. He's also given huge tips to delivery drivers and handed out large sums to random Twitch streamers.
His YouTube channel skyrocketed after he posted a video in 2017 of himself giving $10,000 in sponsorship money to a homeless man. This caught international attention and launched his channel to a new level. He had long desired to become a successful YouTuber, and with his new philanthropic angle, he found his road to online fame. It's hard to peg his motives as altruistic when they can clearly be traced back to a desire for online fame. But it's also possible that once he got a taste of philanthropy, it changed him. He rejected materialism and walked a path of giving.
Ultimately, you never really get to know someone's motives for certain, and more likely than not, they're complex and multifaceted. Knowing whether he's using charity for his own selfish ends or out of a pure sense of duty isn't actually that important. We can find answers to whether Mr. Beast will actually help the world by considering the nature of philanthropy and the ethical considerations involved.
Philanthropy is simply the act of sharing your wealth to help others. To simplify things, it's commonly understood as something rich people do with some of the surplus finances they've accumulated. It's generally used to fill holes in society that are neglected by governments. Philanthropists might donate money to schools that cater to children with special needs or organizations that will help save the planet's dying ecosystems. Philanthropy has helped many people improve their lives while in dire circumstances, but it isn't without criticism.
Philanthropy can often take the form of one-off gifts that are a temporary solution for what is likely to be recurring issues. Now, these gifts don't often address systemic problems in the root causes that perpetuate suffering. Philanthropy can be very undemocratic. Instead of elected officials allocating money on behalf of a voting public, wealthy individuals decide what is worthy of their resources. This can give the rich more power to shape society beyond their basic ability to vote.
When some big donors give large sums to nonprofit organizations, they try to steer where the funds go to suit their specific interests. While the nonprofit usually spreads resources based on their assessment of needs, philanthropists can compromise this balance by attaching requirements to their donations. It's not an unreasonable ask on their behalf, but it might lead to worse results for those in need.
There's also challenges in determining the appropriateness of what's expected from the recipient. Is a photo op asking too much, or what about having to return the favor later in life? When a corporation donates money to a school of journalism, do they expect to be free of criticism in the future? There are power dynamics at play that can make beneficiaries vulnerable to exploitation.
Philanthropists giving donations to a good cause is far better than if they were just hoarding money, and they do help fill gaps that governments fail to address. But we still need to be honest about the limitations and unintended consequences they can have on society, especially when many of these problems are inadvertently compounded by Mr. Beast's philanthropic styling. Many nonprofits today try to treat donations as a partnership with a person in need.
It's a way of giving the receiver of a donation agency instead of treating them as a passive and helpless member of society. Mr. Beast treats philanthropy as something you do for people. Stemming from his prank video roots, he surprises beneficiaries with over-the-top gifts, and we, as the viewer, get to see their gratitude. His use of shock charity makes for exciting viewing, but is it respectful to those he's giving gifts to? The recipients aren't consenting when they're surprised and captured on video.
It's likely that they do afterward, but that's in a situation where they stand to lose the gift or come off as ungrateful. Their consent, in other words, is coerced to an extent. The individuals he features are also likely not completely informed about what they're participating in. Are they fully aware of the scope of Mr. Beast and what it means to be a helpless object of pity in one of his videos?
Despite the fact that he is the most subscribed YouTube channel, most people over 30 aren't really aware of it beyond the name. In one of Mr. Beast's videos, he travels to several African countries, including Kenya and Zimbabwe, to build 100 wells. His actions helped half a million people access clean drinking water, which is no small feat. It also shamed the responsible African governments for failing to spend money on such an essential need.
It can't be denied that Mr. Beast had a big impact on the well-being of Africans in the countries he visited. Yet at the same time, some feel that he was exploiting African children for content. The video was criticized for being an example of white saviorism, where a white person assumes they know what's best for someone who doesn't share the same skin color that they do. Even worse is that Jimmy is capturing their gratitude for us to gawk at. It's the video version of a volunteer abroad taking a selfie with starving children.
Donaldson took to X before the video to suggest that he didn't care how people reacted to it. He did a good deed that helped hundreds of thousands of people and isn't worried about the optics. In a way, he's justified in ignoring the accusations of white saviorism to get people urgent help. But it doesn't mean there couldn't be a more respectful way of doing it.
You could not glorify the act in a video, for one. The example points to a failure of his sporadic one-off methods of giving. A problem with wells is that they need to be consistently maintained. Now, will he be going back to these sites every year to make sure they're still running? In some areas of Africa, 60% of the wells are broken. So there's a long-term system that needs to be in place.
Now, if he wasn't laser-focused on playing the YouTube algorithm, he could probably do a great job at respecting the agency of those that he helps. He could also present his charitable actions not as a gift from someone choosing to be benevolent, but as a duty. As someone with the means, given that his vast wealth comes from acts of charity itself, there's a fair obligation for him to give back to good causes.
As he does in Mr. Beast's videos, the problems he resolves with his gifts are very simplified. Donaldson rarely brings up the root causes of the issues he's helping others to cope with. The people he helps are represented as having simple needs that aren't fulfilled, rather than symptomatic of larger systemic issues found in countries like America. This could include poor health care coverage or runaway housing prices.
The impact of his philanthropy is very limited in this way. Instead of creating lasting change, or at least working towards it, Donaldson is satisfied with the one-offs that come and go. There aren't really any videos with the title "I created systemic change in 20 countries with chronic systemic failures." It wouldn't really make for the most exciting viewing, so I don't blame him. You wouldn't get surprise reactions and immense gratitude.
Instead, you'd have really long meetings about thoughtfully addressing needs, and honestly, I highly doubt that he could keep up his smiling enthusiasm for that long. The impact of Mr. Beast’s specific acts of philanthropy ultimately may not last. His influence, however, might live on in his audience and his peers on YouTube, and it could even create a lasting impact on philanthropy itself. But is that a good thing?
There's already numerous copycat channels on YouTube featuring plucky, loud-talking hosts surprising people with charitable acts, and they follow a similar formula—each clone more imperfect than the last in comparison to the original. The same criticisms that Mr. Beast applies to those channels. On TikTok, gift-giving has become a whole genre of video on a smaller scale.
Much like the format, all this philanthropic content is probably healthier overall than other trending videos like conspiracy videos or prank videos. But are people being encouraged to become more generous? Or are young viewers being influenced to become content creators with a charity spin? Now, helping others is a positive thing; it's just that it's more likely to be a side effect of pursuing online fame. Among those influenced by Mr. Beast, philanthropy is just the means to becoming well-known on YouTube and TikTok.
Mr. Beast's influence seems to be that it's okay to exploit an active charity in the beneficiaries for your own ends. Have charitable acts risen as a result of Mr. Beast? It's really hard to say, but we do know that philanthropy caught on camera has definitely become more common. Philosophers and religious leaders have long expressed the virtue or moral duty of not using others as mere means to an end.
Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher, described this duty as a categorical imperative: act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means. It's questionable that Mr. Beast and his legion of imitators treat the people they give to as an end in themselves. They seem more like a means to their growth as content creators.
When the trend dies down and the chance to become famous from charity stunts fades, then so too does the interest in philanthropy. There is the chance, however, that when content creators get a taste for helping others, it has a positive lasting impression. It just doesn't really seem as likely. If the Mr. Beast formula were to be spread more widely to charity organizations and big donors, what kind of world would that be?
Imagine Doctors Without Borders only helping persons in need if the cause had viral potential. Now picture people dying on stretchers as non-governmental organization workers stop to make sure they capture the gratitude of someone they helped on camera. They don't return to the same region to check in. That wouldn't really be interesting to their viewership—it's on to the next set of people in need who are capable of generating the perfect clickbait headline and thumbnail.
When you apply the Mr. Beast formula more widely to philanthropy, it doesn't really work. As expressed in the first part of Kant's categorical imperative, the essence of immortality then is to make an exception of myself by acting on maxims that I cannot willfully universalize. Is it always wrong to act in one way while wishing that everyone else would act otherwise? Can we universalize helping others only if it produces viral content? No.
The consequences of exclusively Beast philanthropy would be disastrous, which is why the Mr. Beast formula won't save the world. Mr. Beast's world is a chaotic one where we help people not based on need, but on opportunity. No one would really be able to count on help when they need it, and they'd have to fit the demands of an eye-catching thumbnail. If every philanthropist behaved like Mr. Beast, we would actually probably not be better off.
His style of philanthropy has a real hard limitation. By making philanthropy itself the entertainment, he's locked himself into a very limited form of philanthropy. He's doomed to engage in one-off charity stunts that don't lead to reliable, lasting help for those in need. He's cut himself off from the less flashy grunt work that more rigorous philanthropy requires, like research and advocacy.
Many nonprofits conduct research, often by collecting data from their charity work and then use that evidence to advocate local governments on behalf of the people they're trying to assist. It's a way of showing where the real needs are and where government leaders ought to be allocating resources. The right approach to helping people on a large scale is very systemic. It's supported by data connected to the right organized charities and advocates for policy change. But that's not really going to make an exciting video either.
You won't see officials giving a viral-worthy reaction to the evidence that they're underserving thousands of citizens whose well-being they're ultimately responsible for. There are also worthwhile causes that aren't well-suited for a large Mr. Beast audience. Charities that support marginalized groups are sometimes seen as less exciting even when they're fulfilling a real unmet need. Charities, in general, struggle with this problem; some causes are harder to sell than others.
Even if they have the potential to help large numbers of people, by throwing a YouTube audience into the mix, the need to satisfy an all-pleasing cause is heightened that much more. Donaldson claimed he didn't care about the backlash he got over building wells in Africa, but it was likely a calculated consideration. He probably knew his audience would appreciate the gesture while critics are unlikely to be fans of his videos anyway.
He probably wouldn't undertake a cause that would lose his subscribers and fans, and the Beast model of philanthropy encourages others to take the same approach to content. So what are we to make of the philanthropy of Mr. Beast then? While it doesn't seem fit to save the world, or even reliably help, it does still make a difference in people's lives in its random sort of way. Mr. Beast has also founded a charity organization to help out using means not tied directly to YouTube, so it's really not just all flashy jackpot giving from him.
But it's largely just not sustainable. Trends come and go, and the YouTuber at the top of the view chain will inevitably fall from grace, and the impact of their work will wane. Jimmy Donaldson is already mired in recent scandals—he's been accused of running an unsafe work environment, and the trials for his new reality show, Beast Games, have left many people injured and dissatisfied with their treatment.
Entertainment is just a competitive field, and the nature of YouTube means the competition is almost endless. Some competition can be healthy, but it can also drive people to win at all costs. There's no denying that Donaldson is driven to succeed, but as is often the case with overly competitive people, they will cross red lines to stay at the top.
Now, Mr. Beast has a really big buffer to work with. If someone does charitable work, we're more willing to forgive their negative qualities and actions. It's referred to as the charity effect. Donaldson's almost exploitative videos sometimes are less criticized for this reason. If he's ultimately helping people, many believe we shouldn't be critical of him.
Now I'm sure there's going to be a lot of comments under this video suggesting this very thing. But while his individual acts of generosity can be admired, I do think we should be open to scrutinizing the potential harmful effects of philanthropy as content. It robs people of their agency and turns what could be consistent, reliable help into random acts of charity. It perpetuates chaos for clicks.
Now look, I've criticized Mr. Beast a lot in this video, so it is only fair to put forward some recommendations based on where Donaldson and other philanthropists go wrong. So here’s what I would recommend to provide more ethical viral philanthropy content. The first is that you kind of have to give anonymously. So instead of Mr. Beast's big smiley face on the thumbnail, you have the masked philanthropist—they never reveal who they are and leave no traces of their true identity.
This would destroy the power imbalance between the giver and the receiver. The recipient of their donation would never be able to find their generous benefactor and wouldn't be able to return the favor even if they wanted to. Rather than leaping out of a bush to surprise your donation recipient, the masked philanthropist should engage in lengthy consultation sessions with the gift receiver. They should understand their needs by engaging in some discussion and shouldn't force a final say.
They should always make the recipient feel as though they can make decisions on their own. When giving to an organization, it's best to give without strings attached. The masked philanthropist should allow any nonprofit to meet needs based on its own criteria and not seek to fulfill a personal agenda. The masked philanthropist should always address the root causes in the video, and if they're not giving directly to a cause that impacts the source of a problem, they should address the root cause in a thoughtful monologue.
It could be a nice way to cap off a video while making the audience more informed. And even though they're creating content for competitive media platforms, the masked philanthropist should never prioritize entertainment over the safety, agency, and well-being of the beneficiary. Anyone seriously considering making philanthropy entertainment is probably worried that their video might not be very exciting at this point, but I have some suggestions to help with that too.
You could create the spectacle your audience craves as a reward for accomplishing your philanthropic goals. After hitting a target of a 5% reduction in youth homelessness, for example, you could fill your own house with yoga balls and record yourself trying to get around. This could separate philanthropy from entertainment while still giving viewers something exciting to anticipate.
I'm not going to pretend this is a sure way to succeed with more ethical philanthropy entertainment. It's impossible to know with any certainty what will succeed online. But wouldn't a title like "I filled my house with yoga balls after reducing youth homelessness by 5%" at least maybe pique your interest? Now before I leave, I do want to point out that there's a significant drawback to the style of philanthropy I just described.
It's not going to give you the kind of good feelings that Mr. Beast probably gets when he gives so directly. This form of philanthropy is bound to feel less tangible. The results won't be as immediate, and the gratitude will be less capturable in a single moment. It requires you to take a more altruistic approach where you put aside your own desires to help others. You won't be raising your profile online, and you might not be making money, and you probably won't even get those feel-good chemicals released into your brain.
But you will help people with your time and money in a way that might last.
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