Mr Beast is the biggest creator on YouTube, being well known for his giveaways and promotion of kindness and charitable acts to young kids. But in recent weeks, the YouTube Golden Boy has had serious allegations put against him and his team. These allegations include; promoting gambling to children, rigging challenges, illegal lotteries, selling merchandise with fake signatures, having challenges in which people undergo forms of extreme mistreatment, limiting food for people in challenges, changing the recipe for his Feastables, using slavery to make Feastables, treating his employees with little to no respect and putting them against each other.
Mr Beast’s real ideologies-
“Mr Beast” or Jimmy Donaldson, is usually seen in the media as an amazing charitable man. However, a New York Times article has shed light on the reality of Mr Beast with his actual thoughts and how he runs his channel, illuminating the hypocrisy of his own words. One of the most telling parts of this article was when the writer highlighted how Donaldson unironically proved his own hypocrisy. “I don’t give a **** about looks,” he goes on to say. “I just care about functionality.” Yet he also seems to be fixated on how much some shiny objects cost, pointing out that his custom-built, double-sided refrigerator — which he had made so his chef could deliver meals from outside without disturbing him — was 50 grand to install.” Throughout this interview he continued to make claims of not caring about money while sitting in expensive cars and using the newest phone available and having piles of money laying around the studio.
Feastables-
Feastables is Mr Beast’s chocolate brand that has been marketed as ‘infinitely’ better for you than any other chocolate brand, only containing five ingredients. However, a standard Cadbury chocolate has only one more ingredient and that ingredient is mainly used to prevent melting in Australian heat. It also has the same amount of sugar per serving, whilst the Feastables chocolate bar has more saturated fat. However, this is not the problem that comes with the Feastables chocolate. When the chocolate was originally made it was pretty healthy for a chocolate bar, with less sugar than most however, over time the recipe changed. Despite this, they have never removed the videos or marketing of the original claims of Feastables which get thousands of views being an extremely healthy chocolate.
The other issue with Feastables is that it is a part of the Mr Beast brand that encourages illegal lotteries offering money (10k) if you buy the chocolates. With no visible disclaimer that there is a no pay to win system which would make the lottery in fact legal in the eyes of US law. Although there is a section on it on the website that gave strict instructions on how to enter for free, it is over complicated with too many rules to be completed easily. It would take too much time to follow and has many loopholes to deny giveaways.
Employee handbook-
A Mr Beast production guide has been leaked which was written by Jimmy Donaldson and wasn’t given to all employees except the people who worked in production. The biggest parts of this handbook that stand out are; Categorising people as “A, B and C players”. Jimmy states that he only wants “A players” which are employees who are obsessive, learn from mistakes, coachable, intelligent, don’t make excuses, believe in YouTube, see the value of the company and are the best in the world at their job. Though, many insiders claim that the people he labelled as “A players” were actually his close friends. Jimmy then goes on to talk about “B players” and the “C players”, which he describes as average employees. They don’t suck they just aren’t passionate about what they do. They just do what they must to get a pay check. “C players” are poisons and should be transitioned to a different company immediately.
Jimmy describes the next section as owning up to your own mistakes. He says “If your task is to do something and another team asks for your help but, you fall behind THAT IS YOUR FAULT. If the studio is getting burned down and you stop working to put the fire out and you still haven’t completed this task THAT IS YOUR FAULT.”
Another alarming section is the section that discusses the ‘no does not mean no’ idea, this is not only an odd thing to push in a workplace but also it encourages the employees to harass workers that probably have something better to do. “Never take no at face value. If we need a store to buy everything inside of and you call the local dollar tree and the person that answers says “No, you can’t film here.” that literally doesn’t mean s**t. Talk to other employees and if any are fans or any have kids that are fans, try talking to their boss, their boss’s boss, have me dm them on Twitter and try their social team, etc. If after all avenues are exhausted you are left with no, that doesn’t mean you don’t try other dollar trees.”
This is called pushing through no.
There is a section in the production guide that covers random things that should be known as well:
- Do not leave contestants waiting in the sun for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $50,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out.
- I’d rather you would be honest to each other than nice to each other.
- Do not talk down to talent or do anything to make them feel like s**t. I need them to be happy and in good moods and those boys are special to me. Ideally most talks with talent (Chris, Karl, Chandler, Nolan) Go through me, Ali or Tyler to avoid confusion amongst them.
- I want money spent to be shown on camera ideally. If you’re spending over $10,000 on something and it won’t be shown on camera, seriously think about it.
- Pull all nighters weeks before the shoot and not days before the shoot.
- Never do anything that could make us look bad from a PR perspective.
- It’s okay for the boys to be childish.
The most alarming part of this handbook is the part that is encouraging employees to work on more than one video per day.
“if you only ever work on one video during a day, you failed as a Mr Beast employee that day.” Many employees have stated that during their time as a Mr Beast employee they needed to pull all nighters to finish all the assigned work and were encouraged to stay late and work outside of standard hours.
Beast games allegations-
Beast games is a game show run by Mr Beast productions and amazon MGM studios. The winning prize being $5 million dollars with 2000 people competing. During the first instalment of the filming, people who participated did not receive adequate food or medical care with some contestants leaving the arena on stretchers only receiving one meal in the early morning and one at night. Not only that but some had suffered severe injuries from challenges. Despite promises of medications being distributed, several contestants said they had not received their medication on time, including one who needed insulin. One contestant even said, “we signed up for the show, but we didn’t sign up for not being fed or watered”.
Lunchly
UGHHHHHHH…. Okay this article is supposed to be informative and mildly unbiased, but if I see one more Youtuber product targeted towards kids that SUCKS, I fear my eyes may roll so far into the back of my head I will see my brain. The cancelation trio of YouTube KSI, Logan Paul and Jimmy himself teamed up to make a Lunchables (like a little snack lunchbox) copy. It has the exact same foods inside however it comes with the lovely added promo of the not so good for you Feastables and the even worse for you, Prime. They market it as a better for you product, but then proceed to only market some of its qualities. It markets having less calories which is not a brag with children’s food, it has way under the recommended number of calories for primary aged students as well as having electrolytes. Turns out these electrolytes come from potassium or in other words sodium which is terrible to have in large doses. Oh, and just in case you haven’t heard there was Mold in the cheese products because of the packaging. It becomes very obvious that the trio who market the product know nothing about food and they honestly have no passion for this product other than its monetary value. The only good thing that came out from this is “Thick of it” getting the attention it deserves.
Further allegations-
Further allegations with proof include; faking signatures on signed hoodies to make it seem like Jimmy signed it, performing illegal lotteries in streams by saying “In the next five minutes whoever is the most recent order will receive a phone”, rigging competitions like in the boys vs girls video trying to make it so the girls would win, rigging competitions so family and friends will win them, faking videos with CGI after insisting they are real, not cleaning up after a video shoot and using gambling psychological tactics to make kids subscribe and buy merchandise.
There are so many allegations coming out each day, within the company there are several allegations of mistreatment of employees and favouritism of certain staff. Additionally, there have been allegations against main cast member Ava Tyson of talking to underage teens and being friends with many questionable people. The CEO James Warren of being horrible to staff and offering drugs to editors to stay late, and many other claims, however these allegations don’t have much weight to them when it comes to evidence, more just employees hearing things and telling reporters. Nevertheless, this does not take away from the weight of the accusations and if they are proven true and correct then Mr Beast will no longer be the golden boy of YouTube.
