Mr Beast is incredibly successful at this, in that his stunts produce massive numbers for very little outlay. A friend's kid in his teens was telling me about how he's the most generous person he's ever seen and it make me wince a little as I really don't want to be that guy and wade into it with a "well, actually".
Social media has made the world an incredibly vapid place.
I hope anyway.
Whether it’s TikTok videos with that awful TTS voiceover reading the caption (I can read it myself, thanks) or YouTube videos that now always start with a ~5 seconds extract which spoils the entire video, or gaming videos with insufferable personalities. Oh and don’t forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell!
I vastly prefer this to the kind of “informational” video that’s designed to keep you watching a 10 minute video for the 10 second answer
Blizzard would probably require him to spend all the money though, as more money = more clicks.
I think both are no.
Not to suggest he's operating in any way like a non-profit, but they all receive money and then distribute that money in ways that either increase the future money they can use for their mission or directly on the mission itself. The fact that he's built a self-sustaining model for helping individuals without merely forking over his own assets is impressive.
His first viral "giveaway" video was him giving a homeless person $10,000. That wasn't his money. He got a company to invest in him by giving him the money to donate (while filming it) and promised them a return on their money. It's been a business venture from the outset.
That said, it doesn't really bother me. If he makes $1m dollars giving away $500k, so be it. He reinvests that money back into his business, that employs many, many people and sometime finds its way back to those in need. He's not inherently rich, he needs to make money to donate it and his means of making that money is sometimes exploiting the very act for likes, clicks and ad revenue.
Be that guy; what's your criticism about Mr Beast's generosity? He does a lot of content which could be fake; like giving his friends $20,000, but ones which look more serious and genuine and costly include:
- Opened a "free bank" where he loaned money into six figures to local people, then surprise! it's not a loan, they can keep it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORUX1lHbOa8
- Bought everything in a supermarket and donated it to a food bank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha4tRQwKIUg
- Donated $100k to plant trees, and organised a fundraiser which raised $21M to plant 20M trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPJKxAhLw5I
- Ran a contest of TV show style challenges (endurance, falling into goop) with some of his viewers as contestents, with a million dollar prize at the end that one of them won: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ4m4zD7BBA
- Gave away three houses or free rent for a year in them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJH28ICkCdU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfv1QaRzJg8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cCpZl8euLI
- Bought every car in a car dealership and gave them away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLnjRLrvLU
- Gives his credit card to people, encouraging them to spend tens thousands of dollars on things they get to keep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYVjOfoU3uI
What's vapid or not generous enough about these for your liking?
It's like when nestle announces they are going to plant 1 million trees - like yeah, it's very generous of you, no doubt - but you are doing it as a marketing exercise.
Mr Beast is making money this way. I am extremely far from saying that there's anything wrong with it - but it's not charity in my mind. It's just a business that happens to benefit random bystanders from time to time.
I share an unsettled feeling about this. I think it is because things like this are a visceral reminder of differences between the rich and poor. A life altering struggle for a poor person is a solved by ten minutes of amusement from a rich person - "here, take my card and buy whatever you need."
I'm not saying it's not. I don't want him to stop. But I don't think I'd call it charity personally(and some people do, that's why I'm making this point).
Like, let me try again with an example - if you pull $10k out of your account and give it to a homeless person, that's charity, right?
Ok, but what if you get someone to invest $10k into you making a youtube video, because you promise them they will make this money back from monetization, and you then record a youtube video of giving the homeless person that exact $10k. The video then proceeds to make way more than that $10k in revenue. Is that charity too? After all the end result is the same - the homeless person was given money. Or is it just good business?
The second example is exactly what Mr Beast has done. I'm not saying he shouldn't have - just observing that what he does, the entire spectacle of it - it's just a business venture.
Any one of the aforementioned things could have been done at any time, anywhere, on an ongoing basis, that would have helped communities in a sustainable way.
When he gives the cars away, or makes loans to people, he often films people getting significantly different amounts (or items of significantly differing value) simultaneously. I would assume the reactions are more valuable when someone has gotten less than one of their friends in the same group - this in particular is cruelty, not kindness.
Even setting the above aside, the big issue I have with it is that it’s not charity or altruism but is masquerading as such for profit. This is his business. Every act is a carefully calculated profit/loss equation relative to how many views he thinks he can get.
Typically philanthropy would be considered willingly disposing of money you earned elsewhere when it’s not necessary for you to do so, in order to help a cause.
Beast isn’t doing this. He’s reinvesting his profits into growing his business.
You wouldn’t call a mechanic a philanthropist for fixing people’s cars for money, even though they’ve done something that people appreciated.
At best, Beast is redistributing the ad revenue from his viewers and skimming signifcantly from the top (given that it’s expected he’s approaching billionaire status).
For what it’s worth I do respect his business acumen. He’s found a good hustle and is working it very well.
You could make the same case for Walmart: look at all the people (employees) they hand money out to! With many of them likely having much tougher lives than I do and thus being absolutely deserving of the money. But Walmart does it for the sole reason that it improves their bottom line —- just like Mr Beast.
Do you think Mr Beast would insist on spending millions in a video if he could create the same income from just “Giving $1.5 to strangers!” videos?
Mr. Beast’s brand, and presumably identity, centers around a Calvinist ethic that hard work is a virtue even when exerted to meaningless ends. There’s a ‘don’t act too big for your britches’ undercurrent as well, flashy cars are props returned at the end of the day, not the spoils. He trades a lot of the mawkish sentimentality for self-deprecation.
Another practical difference is that giving strangers money provides more actual utility vs a bouquet of flowers. His targets for interaction are usually more appropriate, often people he has a reason to interact with or where he asks for participation.
I don't fault them. They're only responding the world that we, the older generation, are implicitly condoning. Fact is, our culture does not teach the benefits of generosity much, and the few instances we see are often highly public: "$FAMOUS_PERSON donates $LARGE_SUM to $NONPROFIT!" Anonymous donors are never trumpeted the same way.
There is a marketplace for virtues, and people need role models.
Good luck convincing people of this. One of the primary purposes of religion was to provide that role model figure, but society has thrown out that concept altogether. Nowadays I see more of a "everyone is flawed and whoever you think is a role model is probably a secret pervert or something" philosophy as common. So what does anyone expect? If we decide the theological/moral foundation of society is false without replacing it, then obviously morality will change as a result. It's like throwing out the bath water, and then complaining that there's no baby for some mysterious reason.
Some of these incidents even make the news, positioned as some heartwarming feel good story.
In short from the perspective of the attention seeker/clout beast - it works.