Dangerous YouTuber? MrBeast is just Mr Blobby for the internet age

His goofy videos make him a fortune (he gives away a lot of it) and a hero to daft young teens (among some of his 230 million followers), but critics say wheezes like giving piles of cash to the homeless make MrBeast a dubious role model. Will Gore, whose son is obsessed with the star, weighs the evidence

For one of his wacky stunts, MrBeast is buried alive for seven days... do not try this at home (MrBeast/YouTube)

At the start of last week, it appeared that half of Britain had just discovered MrBeast. The other half would have been aghast, but they were too busy watching his YouTube stunts to even notice what was going on in what we confidently used to call the real world.

On the off-chance that you’ve been on a news-free retreat in recent days, let me explain that MrBeast is a famous internet star. He spends his time creating spectacular videos for his 230 million subscribers, earning gazillions of dollars in the process, and doing a fair bit of philanthropy on the side. He is, says my son, the YouTube GOAT.

Until a couple of weeks ago, old Beastie – or Jimmy Donaldson, as he’s known to his mum – had mostly kept his content off X (formerly Twitter, formerly good), on the basis that it wasn’t worth his while. But in what appears to be an experiment by him, and/or by X, and/or X’s remaining advertisers, he posted an old video and within a week had racked up sufficient views to earn a quarter of a million bucks. This astonishing figure was enough to bring MrBeast to the masses – or at least, to anyone over 30 without kids under 16. Jeremy Vine had a phone-in about it on Radio 2 and wondered how he’d never heard of him.