When Madison Malone Kircher tried to explain MrBeast to her parents, it didn’t go well. “Essentially, you should grab the nearest 10-year-old you can find in the least creepy manner, because that’s the most effective way to understand the mania that is MrBeast. MrBeast is like if the Beatles were YouTubers,” said Malone Kircher, who reports on the internet over at the New York Times.

He has 309 million subscribers, which is just an astonishing number. And his videos feature these provocative stunts. “They’re gamified videos where the prize is always something really extravagant. He’s given away a private island, he gives away cars, he gives away truly astonishing sums of money. And in exchange, you will do whatever he asks of you.” 

In his most recent video, you had to survive 100 days in a nuclear bunker to win $2.5 million. The catch? “The money was in the bunker, in a fireplace. And at any time during the day, an alarm could go off, and you had very few seconds to get to the alarm to turn it off or the money would incinerate,” explained Malone Kircher.

Given all this, it’s easy to see why Hollywood would come calling. Earlier this year, MrBeast landed a hefty deal with Amazon MGM Studios. The plan is to take his reality show formula to the max. He dubbed the new thousand-person challenge he’s been filming the Beast Games. That’s when the trouble began. Now MrBeast is facing allegations of mistreating his contestants and colleagues, and older accusations are resurfacing, too—stuff that didn’t stick before.

A lot of his brand is invested in him seeming good, but is he? On Thursday’s episode of What Next, we spoke about whether MrBeast is starting to lose his shine. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: So where did MrBeast come from? What’s his real name?

Madison Malone Kircher: Jimmy Donaldson. He came from North Carolina, famously still lives there, is buying up houses that he likes his employees to live in Greenville, near Raleigh. He got his start on YouTube from a pretty early age, has always gone by some variation of MrBeast—I believe the original was MrBeast 6000—and from the outset, very astutely, was constantly trying to figure out how to crack YouTube’s algorithm, how to game the system for maximum virality. There were initial attempts that didn’t go as well. There was an era where he was into gaming and streaming himself playing Minecraft, those sorts of things. But where he really starts to figure it out: He goes viral in 2017, in a video where he just counts to 100,000—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 … Forty-some hours later he hits 100,000. This video goes viral.

Whoa!

And from there, he’s kind of figured out Oh, this is it. This is how I do it. And so it’s “I spun a fidget spinner for 24 hours” …

Dares.

Yes. The sort of thing that a teenage boy might dare another teenage boy to do. And people started watching it in droves.

Did he evolve? Did he start out being more prank-y? And then he kind of became philanthropic?

He’s definitely moved away from himself being part of the stunts. One of MrBeast’s hallmarks, and it’s now a huge staple on YouTube that he definitely created—by 2018, he had given out like $1 million throughout his stunts and had become seen as this YouTube philanthropist. And what he figured out was I don’t have to have $100,000 to give away. I can call up insert-X-brand cornflakes. They’ll give me $100,000 and sponsor the video. We do our stunt, they get great press, and I get to be the guy who gives away money by the bagful.

Very little risk for himself.

Right? You wish you’d thought of it. He has said, “I still don’t see myself as a wealthy person.” He talks about how a lot of these videos are sponsored. But let’s be clear, the man is, by most reports, probably raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. The figures put it at this point somewhere between $500 million to $700 million annually.

Wow.

Because there’s ad revenue on the videos he’s putting out.

He’s also a workaholic, by all reports. He’s described his personality as “YouTube.”

Yeah. He describes himself as not sleeping. He’s recently described several $100,000 budget videos that he scrapped because they weren’t good enough. I’m trying to recall an interview in which he said, “I basically am, like, five minutes away from a panic attack every hour of every day.” Which is not what you would expect, I think.

No, you’d expect him to be kind of joyful. Like his whole job is performing joy.

He’s Willy Wonka!

I want to break down one of his videos in particular, which was really a breakout video for him, because it’s so full of all of the tropes you see in everything he does. And this is the video where he “helps a thousand people see.” It’s notable because what he’s doing is giving cataract surgery, but he doesn’t really say that.

No, he’s laying hands.

Cataracts are boring. He never deals with, like, why can’t these people access a 10-minute surgery that they clearly need? The reason being poverty, pretty clearly, if you look at who he’s helping. What stands out to you about this video?

We live in an era where access to health care, access to money to pay for health care is, out of reach for so, so, so many people. But that’s not fun to talk about. That’s not exciting to talk about.

It is a great thing, I have to say. Of all the things happening on the internet, sure, people have done a lot worse than the day Jimmy Donaldson woke up and said, “You know what I’m going to do for clout today? I’m going to give cataract surgery to a thousand people who can’t afford it.”

And the video, it’s so well-designed, like a Swiss watch, to keep you paying attention. First you see people one after another getting their sight back, right? And they’re amazed by being able to see. Then you slowly learn Oh, they’re going to get money on the back end of this. Each of them gets $10,000. Then there’s an eye chart he has them read. Then a guy says, “I want to drive.” And they’re like, We’re getting him a Tesla. And it just keeps ratcheting and ratcheting and ratcheting.

It does kind of get you, doesn’t it? But he doesn’t talk about the serious things because that’s not attractive. That’s not what people come to watch. They come to watch quickly edited videos where things go zip and zap and blop and stuff lights on fire, and then you get a prize.

I can see why Amazon MGM Studios would come to this guy. When you heard this deal was happening, what did you think?

I did pause a little, and maybe I should have paused more, but I thought because it had this studio behind it, that was going to lend it legitimacy. Time magazine had a profile of MrBeast earlier this year that included some former employees saying, “The sets aren’t safe. They’re dangerous.” There’s one former employee who has alleged he was let go for raising safety concerns on set. I had that in the back of my mind. But at the same time, I’m thinking, OK, it’s Amazon. They produce shows all the time. Maybe they know how to run a TV show. They know how to produce a reality show.

Is that how it turned out?

Not so much. A couple of weeks ago, in the space of an hour, I got two tips from two completely different folks who had participated in these games, and their stories were almost identical: This was chaos. This was dangerous. This was scary. I can’t believe MrBeast did this. And I can’t believe I feel compelled as a MrBeast fan to talk about it.

Give me the 30-second rundown: What is Beast Games?

It’s a reality competition show where several thousand people vie to win $5 million.

By doing all kinds of things—stunts?

They were told it would be physical challenges, mental challenges. That makes me think of Survivor. They were expected to leave their homes, fly to Las Vegas, and then they were taken to a football stadium where they were going to compete until somebody won.

I heard from a couple of people who participated in the show. And I ended up speaking to well over a dozen participants over the course of my reporting, and they said they didn’t feel safe. And because this is a reality show that is ongoing—it is winnowing the field down to the final winner; they’re taping possibly as we speak—they thought, If this was Round One, what does Round Two look like?

There was supposed to be a thousand people there competing against each other in some way.

The folks I talked to said they filled out elaborate questionnaires. They were asked pretty out-there questions. Would you be willing to be buried alive? If we threw you off a boat, could you swim to shore? But all things they thought to expect, because, again, if you know MrBeast, you know what you’re getting into. And the contract had language that essentially boiled down to “I’m willing to die for this,” which sounds extreme, but let’s be clear: When you go on Survivor, for example, I am certain you sign a contract that says, “I’m willing to die for this, and my family will not sue you if that does happen.” This is reality TV.

They were ready for it. These folks fly to Las Vegas from all around the country, and they discover, actually, it’s 2,000 people.

That means they have much less of a chance of getting to the end.

If you thought you had a 1 in 1,000 chance of winning $5 million, and now suddenly your chances are half as good, it doesn’t feel great. So, these folks all fly in to Vegas and from the jump, it is just utter chaos. If you have ever been, I don’t know, a wedding planner or a camp counselor, if you’re trying to wrangle a group of people to do something, professional wranglers will tell you, “Oh, you thought that was going to take 30 minutes. You’ve got 100 people. Try two hours.” Now imagine that’s 2,000 people. It seems as though MrBeast and his production team were just not equipped for the sheer volume of people they would need to feed and move and manage, and the bodily functions that come along with 2,000 people. You laugh, but it’s essentially like you’ve got a classroom full of kindergartners.

They’re going to have to pee.

These people check in to the hotel, they hand over their bags, and this was a real sticking point. In their intake forms, they had to disclose medical conditions. Many of them had said, “I have X condition, I take Y medication at 9 p.m. and 9 a.m.,” and they were accepted on to the show and told that their medical needs would be met. This did not turn out to be the case for a number of folks I spoke to who did not receive their medications for hours or even days. This included things like insulin.

Yeah, that’s not good. What happened when they tried?

I spoke to some people who said, “The production staff I talked to were so kind, but they had no information.” And then I had people describe production staff who yelled at them and cursed them out.

And they had given over all of their stuff, right?

They had nothing on them. They had handed over their medication and, notably, a Ziploc bag containing underwear for five days.

Wow.

They didn’t really get those in a timely manner. I spoke to one contestant who led a group of women who were menstruating on an attempt to get their underwear in an expedient manner, and they were laughed at.

I would say there were two types of folks I talked to. You have people who are here because $5 million sounds great, but also because they just are big MrBeast fans. How exciting! And then the other group are people who really need this money, who are talking about things that they would buy with it, the loans they would pay off, the medical debt they would pay off, the houses they would buy for their families. These really deeply human, personal things that they’re now about to go sleep, eat, and not change their underwear at a football stadium for for several days.

When it came to the actual competition, your reporting showed how the trials themselves really disadvantaged anyone who wasn’t a guy. Can you explain?

So, they all arrive at Allegiant Stadium, home of the Las Vegas Raiders, and the very first challenge was a physical challenge where they were broken down into five groups of 400 people, and they all had to pull on a rope with a really heavy weight at the end of it. Last group to lift the rope loses.

OK.

But instead of counting off into teams, they threw down piles of jerseys in different colors and said, “Have at it.” A bunch of big, muscly guys get to the front. They start grabbing jerseys of a specific color and refusing to give them to women, to smaller folks, to older folks. The contestants did range anywhere from 18 to 82. So if you looked like you weren’t going to be able to keep up physically, well, too bad.

Do we know the results of what happened after that?

We do. I should also mention this entire scene was described to me by various people as a crush. Several of my sources said, “I’ve read a lot about when things go wrong at concerts with crowds, and it felt like that. I couldn’t breathe. I was trapped. I couldn’t move.” The team that wound up having the most women and older folks on it loses immediately. And many of the folks I spoke to were very frustrated about that. They feel that it wasn’t fair. If you’re going to humiliate yourself for $5 million, you at least want to know you had a fair shake.