MrBeast is suing the company behind his fast-food chain. Last year Megankstack chronicled her road trip down South with her boys to find the improbable folk hero
We returned to America from Asia in the covid-heavy summer of 2020, moved to an unfamiliar suburb and enrolled the kids at the local school, where each boy was issued a new laptop for “distance learning”. YouTube was supposed to be blocked, but of course they found a hack: it could be streamed through Google Slides.During that bleak school year, Max tried to find his way as a new kid, reduced to logging on to a laptop with classmates he’d never met in person.
I couldn’t go back and erase the difficulty of the pandemic and our international move, our kids’ loneliness, the screens they’d seized upon as succour. I could only adapt and keep going. That entailed at least considering whether my hostility towards my children’s virtual interests was appropriate or fair, and interrogating my assumption that technology was bad.
We met Jordan Sheets, the women’s ministry director, and her husband, both sun-kissed and earnest. They told me that MrBeast’s family had belonged to the church but suggested, vaguely, that the Donaldsons weren’t members anymore. Still, I felt the boys quicken with excitement. MrBeast had gone to church here!
Playing with numbers to find out how much space and time they fill is a recurring Beast theme. One of his breakthrough hits was a so-dumb-it’s-brilliant video from 2017 in which he sat in a chair, stared into the camera and counted to 100,000. It took 40 hours and has garnered 26m views. But it was clear to my kids that MrBeast was, first and foremost, dispensing money. Getting into a room with him was like playing the lottery, except with a far higher chance of winning a prize.
I thought about the extremes of his videos, and their ambition – buying up islands to give away, building re-creations of the game Battleship, hiring bounty hunters and anagent and endless others. I’d been imagining his method as a slow co-opting, person by person, one ingratiating gesture after the next, year by year, the purchase of loyalty.
When we set out on this journey, I had nothing particular to ask Jimmy Donaldson. I thought my kids would do the talking. But by now I had questions. I’d noticed he kept dropping references to killing himself in the Rogan interview. Just little jokes, little asides; I doubt he even noticed himself. Now I wondered whether he, too, had tasted dread. I wondered if he ever hated his hometown.
I saw on Google that the dealership was closed: it was Sunday. I started driving, anyway. You never know, right? One more try, and then it was time to go home. We parked outside, walked up to the front and Max – who had grown bold during our travels – knocked on the glass.
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