X appears to be juicing MrBeast’s views to woo the YouTuber to the platform, pushing video upload into users’ feeds as an unlabeled ad::undefined
X appears to be juicing MrBeast’s views to woo the YouTuber to the platform, pushing video upload into users’ feeds as an unlabeled ad::undefined
Disclaimer: I don’t really watch Mr. Beast all that much.
Mr. Beast’s origin story (apparently) is that he went all in on Bitcoin really early, like so early that when it blew up he became a multi-millionaire (we don’t actually know exactly how much money he got, it could be a lot, it seems like a fuck ton).
By some grace of God he had a really good influence and decided to use that money for charity, creating a YouTube channel to film that charity and make some money back on his endeavors. He talks a lot now about how he makes so much off of YouTube videos that he can often just break even on the crazy prizes he gives out based on the views he gets.
Now based on this it seems pretty chill. Mr. Beast made a fuckload of money and is working within the system of capitalism to give it back to some of the most needy (I mean he’s done stuff like traveled to Africa to help install water wells in tiny remote villages, say whatever you want but that’s good charity.)
The problem is, as other people in this thread pointed out Mr. Beast has done a ton of podcasts talking about his work and it’s pretty clear that he actually thinks that this is how the system is supposed to work, that the only issue is that more rich people aren’t giving away their money like he is and if that happened the system would be working perfectly. That’s a stupid take, and as I mentioned before, I think he only became this charitable as a fluke, he’s an exception to the rule.
Now I’ll defend him: I think that Mr. Beast gets a lot more hate than he deserves. He’s one of the very few rich people who is truly giving away most of his money to other people (sure, lots of his videos are him giving away money to middle-american white people but that doesn’t even matter that much) he gets hate because he places himself in the spotlight the “controversy around every video” that you point to is a product of this. It’s part of the production and only makes him more famous. Mr. Beast is only a symptom of a disease and directing hate towards him is only done because it’s easy.
Like I said earlier, he’s an exception to the rule, and the rule is that people this rich don’t engage in any charity nearly this much. It’s bizarre that people focus on the one rich person doing that. Oh wait, it’s not, it’s just a bunch of lugheads falling for the American celebrity worship/attention culture but in reverse.
Rich people engaging in charity are just washing their own image. Under the current system, there’s no way to be rich without exploiting the poor. That’s just how the system works. No amount of charity will change that.
He literally just explained a way that MrBeast got extremely rich without exploiting the poor. He got into Bitcoin super early, and cashed out at a peak, becoming a multimillionaire overnight. No poor exploitation at all there.
Except for the faceless idiots that bought in during one of those peaks and left with big debts. Otherwise, no exploitation anywhere!
As the OP, I’d like to mention here that I never said or thought that Bitcoin involves no poor exploitation.
My issue with the hate he gets is he seems to get raked over the coals more than people giving away nothing because he’s “exploiting” people to fund it. Im just so sick of people jumping on even slight improvement over the status quo because they expect perfection from anybody trying to do any good. Theres a reason everything is being enshittified. Theres no reason people benefitting from the system have to even slightly improve it because every idealist who probably hasn’t done shit to improve the world will be there waggling their finger.
Effective altruism.