Against my will, I’ve come to love the charisma black hole that is MrBeast

Everything I’ve learned about MrBeast has been against my will. As the parent of a nine-year-old son, I have been forced to watch hours of his PG-rated TV reality competition Beast Games with my child to do due diligence that MrBeast is not some insidious gateway to the manosphere.

My child is such a dedicated fan that he borrows unauthorised biographies on the YouTuber. (Our local library has not one but two books dedicated to his life - sorry, Tom Cruise, you only have one.)

So I know via osmosis that MrBeast, aka 28-year-old American phenomenon Jimmy Donaldson, is the world’s biggest YouTube star, a supernova of social media, with a follower count currently standing at 495 million subscribers. I know he forgoes a space in his name in a visually unpleasant manner that will make those who value proper punctuation grind their teeth.

Like many grown-up Aussies, MrBeast really came to my attention on his first visit to Australia in 2024, where he was swarmed by primary schoolers taking the day off school in the hopes of winning a Lambo, while the adults were all going, “Who?” and frantically reading explainers on the guy.

Donaldson started his YouTube channel in 2012 at the age of 13 and managed to amass his followers by obsessively studying the platform’s algorithm to see what literally clicked. He first found success with stunts like spending 40 hours counting to 100,000 in 2017 and later through controversial and clickbaity mass philanthropy such as funding eye surgery for 1000 blind people in 2023.

His biggest video, with a staggering 932 million views, was his 2021 real-life recreation of K-drama Squid Game with a grand prize of $456,000. In case you haven’t twigged, MrBeast always goes big.

MrBeast is not even the boy-next-door, he’s like the cousin of the boy-next-door who you barely notice.

To little kids MrBeast is like a social media Willy Wonka (indeed he even made his own Wonka-inspired chocolate factory to give away), constantly coming up with bonkers schemes and handing out wads of cash. He’s managed to spin his social media fame into several enterprises of varying quality, most famously his ethically sourced and surprisingly decent chocolate line Feastables.

In 2024, he made his first venture into mainstream television with the big-budget reality contest Beast Games, which broke records with its 10 million dollar first prize.

So when you hear that MrBeast has almost a half-billion subscribers and a billion-dollar empire as a college dropout (community college no less, he’s no Gates or Zuckerberg-style Harvard dropout), you’d imagine he must be wildly charismatic. You’d be wildly wrong.

MrBeast is not even the boy-next-door, he’s like the cousin of the boy-next-door who you barely notice and can never remember if his name is Jake, Josh or Jimmy. I’ve watched so much of Donaldson (again, against my will) and he’s like a charisma black hole. Everyone is so excited when MrBeast turns up on set and then he just stands there listlessly giving nothing.

At first I was deeply confused – how can this be the most-watched guy on YouTube? Stardom seems easiest to attain for the beautiful and the charming, while Donaldson is pure guy-from-your-IT-department vibes. MrBeast is the opposite of the tanned, muscled, in-your-face celebs of TikTok and Instagram. In a world that values extroverts, I love that an introvert has come out on top and not had to change his personality.

Put simply, MrBeast is the anti-nepo baby. Instead of privilege and contacts, he grew up a shy kid often moving around due to being raised in a military family. In his teens he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, forcing him to give up his then-passion of baseball and pivot his full focus to YouTube.

He had no connections, no natural facility for it, only his outlandish ideas and analytical mind to get to the absolute top of the content creator heap, and that’s a message I don’t hate young children getting. He’s a masterclass in the power of persistence.

But even if you hate everything MrBeast stands for, there’s one more reason I believe us non-Gen Alphas should appreciate Donaldson. In the coming AI doom-pocalypse, no doubt led by virtual actor Tilly Norwood, we will need someone Terminator-style to save us all against our potential robotic overlords.

As someone who figured out how to ride the YouTube algorithm all the way to billionaire status, I believe MrBeast is the only one who could write the prompt that might save humanity, and that is worth clicking like and subscribe for.

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