In business news and progressive commentary alike, I’ve often encountered a phrase that’s used sometimes neutrally but often critically to describe the efforts of an executive team to exponentially grow the market share—and thus, the valuation—of some game-changing business by any means necessary: the relentless pursuit of scale.
The phrase is often used to characterize billion-dollar businesses, especially start-ups, in two spheres: tech and media, increasingly one and the same. In media, though, this applies less to the David Zaslavs of the world than it does to the teen and 20-something masters of the algorithms of TikTok and YouTube.
MrBeast, born Jimmy Donaldson, aged 27, is the current king of YouTube, with more than 450 million subscribers—the most of any account in the history of the platform. He’s a particularly dogged creator whose relentless pursuit of scale has over the past several years brought him to fame beyond YouTube. He’s a strange, expansionist figure—a roving ad hoc game show host–slash–stunt philanthropist whose logo adorns cheapo chocolate bars sold in gas stations all across the country.
To wit: This past Thursday, MrBeast opened an indoor theme park, Beast Land, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as part of a seasonal, state-sponsored entertainment initiative. A section of the park, Beast Arena, reportedly lets visitors participate in the sort of competitive stunts that you’d typically see in MrBeast’s videos; in a promotional reel, MrBeast promises “custom-made games” similar to those developed for his social media platforms.
A month ago, Aziz Ansari, Bill Burr, Pete Davidson, and several other comedians from the U.S. faced a great deal of backlash back home for accepting sponsorship from the Saudi government to play the Riyadh Comedy Festival. That backlash largely came because comedians otherwise hold a certain subversive credibility, in this country at least, as a vanguard of free expression; MrBeast, on the other hand, is such a blandly ambitious figure that the usual hand-wringing about the kingdom’s low regard for human rights would seem entirely lost on him and distinctly pointless in his case. Riyadh is but another gleaming waypoint on his path to world domination.
MrBeast is, in many ways, the culmination of every hard-fought insight that star creators before him have gleaned—about the algorithm, about the perils of personal branding—in the first 20 years of YouTube. The platform’s first king, PewDiePie, was an energetically candid and frequently contentious gamer who made his subscribers feel like an army. He successfully prototyped the very idea of a content creator becoming a full-time, high-earning professional with nothing but a webcam and Sony Vegas. PewDiePie became a multimillion-dollar business unto himself, but even at the height of his earning power, he was basically a guy streaming video game playthroughs from the comfort of his bedroom. The Paul brothers (and others) eventually brought some gloss to social media stardom: Jake and Logan both flaunted their apparent wealth in novelty rap videos shot at luxury rentals in Hidden Hills, and so they achieved a more conventionally glamorous, drama-driven “reality” stardom à la the Kardashians. But MrBeast was, for the longest time, more PewDiePie than Paul: one of a million gamer upstarts on YouTube spamming quick hits about Minecraft.
The First YouTube Republic ended with PewDiePie famously losing his over-the-top and conspicuously one-sided subscription war with the Indian entertainment company T-Series. What’s notable, though, is how meaningless the great subscriber war was quickly rendered by the ascent of MrBeast, who would ultimately overcome both PewDiePie (now no. 12) and T-Series (now no. 2) with a content strategy trained on the success of both their approaches: MrBeast would produce highly standardized videos of high-concept, feel-good stunts involving lucky participants—for example, “$10,000 Every Day You Survive in a Grocery Store”—and he’d effectively turn support for his channel into a sort of megaviral bonhomie. His growth was something akin to nuclear fusion. Five years on from “I Counted to 100,000,” MrBeast was overseeing an entertainment empire with secondary ventures into food and beverage. MrBeast was, in the most corporate sense, a brand. He was a YouTuber whose personality and point of view were beside the point because the appeal of his videos was all in the concepts and the execution. So MrBeast, an internet personality with remarkably little main character energy about him, somewhat paradoxically became the new main character of YouTube, circa 2020.
Typically, MrBeast posts a few videos per month, some stunts (“I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive”), some challenges (“Survive 30 Days Chained to Your Ex, Win $250,000”), some competitions (“$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!”), and then some feel-good philanthropic showcases (“I Built 100 Wells in Africa”), most 20 to 30 minutes in length, each apparently rivaling a prime-time TV game show in production costs—and this was before MrBeast signed a $100 million deal with Amazon to host and produce a reality competition series, Beast Games, for Prime Video. His YouTube channel is a story of escalations. Each new video is, on the conceptual level, ideally more bonkers than the last, and you’re left wondering what surreal peak he’ll eventually reach: MrBeast partnering with SpaceX, perhaps, to host a sleep deprivation challenge on a custom-built space station. MrBeast is the Jeff Probst of his generation but then also its harrowingly earnest, kid-friendly Jigsaw.
His niche is so perfectly calibrated: MrBeast, like so many YouTubers, is often doing stupid shit, basically, but a relatively tame manner of stupid shit, the sort of stupid shit that easily captivates a preteen boy while nevertheless being agreeable to the anxious oversight of said boy’s mom. He was heaven-sent for the true masters of the algorithm: 12-year-olds. Where PewDiePie would prove prone to racial slurs and unfortunate mentions of Hitler, MrBeast would remain resolutely inoffensive. Where the Pauls always seemed to be setting money on fire, MrBeast would dutifully reinvest the ad revenue from his latest generosity gimmick into a bigger and better one. He’d become the pop-up era’s Willy Wonka. His YouTube thumbnails would be the finishing touch of his personal brand: For most of them, MrBeast fixes his face into a painfully wide, proudly derpy, and now utterly familiar grin, one that has at this point burned into countless LCDs worldwide.
MrBeast often describes his success on YouTube as a product of his obsession with YouTube: He studied the algorithm the same way a pianist studies Bach. PewDiePie, the Paul brothers, and many other forebears of MrBeast had over the years already made it quite clear: The algorithm is, essentially, a game, and while it’s both cruel and capricious at times, it is fundamentally knowable, gameable, beatable. MrBeast played to win.
We’re now squarely in the phase of MrBeast’s stardom when the easy awe of a tween fan base on his formative platform is now competing with the bewilderment of a wider, older audience that isn’t entirely fluent in the idiosyncrasies of Zoomer YouTuber. MrBeast is a particularly jarring (if friendly enough) face of the general collapse of distinctions between children’s entertainment and what should be the rest of popular culture. Really, the same could be said about PewDiePie, the Paul brothers, and several others who’ve made versions of this leap in recent years: Prepubescent adoration is what elevated MrBeast, and so in his relentless pursuit of scale, he has inevitably run up against certain generational limits. So many user comments on the episodes of Beast Games on Prime Video—so, beyond the proper context for MrBeast—express disappointment with the show but also bewilderment at the wider popularity of its host, who (as the SNL writers also just noted earlier this month) is generally going to be seen by anyone under the age of 25 as a dead-eyed void of charisma, an anti-celebrity, if anything.
But it’s as I said before—his personality isn’t particularly captivating, but the clarity and intensity of his purpose are something to behold. You try spending 40 consecutive hours staring into a webcam and counting to 100,000, for the love of the game. Could you do it? How much do you want it, really—“it” being peerless dominance of the media of the future? What if I threw in $300,000 and a round trip to Riyadh in a Hawker 800XP? You get to keep the jet, by the way. Now we’re talking. Now we’re playing his game.
