As any sixth grade boy can tell you, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson isn’t exactly a subtle guy. In just a few short years, he’s gone from an unknown streamer to YouTube’s first ever billionaire, leveraging the promise of life-changing wealth to entice people into becoming test subjects for his Machiavellian productions.
It’s a winning — if highly controversial — formula. Donaldson’s latest stunt, however, managed to rattle even his most prepubescent fans.
Titled “Would You Risk Dying For $500,000?” Donaldson’s most recent video depicts a stuntman struggling through seven harebrained challenges, including a flaming obstacle course and a 50-ft free climb while chained to his buddy. Those went over well enough — it’s classic MrBeast, after all. But the opening challenge, showing Donaldson’s squirming stuntman tied to a chair in a burning building, is what really stole the show.
“Would you risk burning alive for half-a-million dollars!?” Donaldson screams to the man the second the video opens. His contestant replies “yes let’s do it” before the YouTuber shuts the door behind him, shouting “you’re braver than me — this is crazy!”
For the “challenge,” the stuntman has to wrestle free of his ropes Houdini-style and wrangle up as many duffle bags worth of cash as he can before the whole building goes up in flames. Since this is seemingly a real fire — meaning the house is getting progressively hotter — the only thing stopping the contestant is his own appetite for pain and suffering.
The man left the burning house largely unscathed with half the duffel bags — which Donaldson makes him suffer further to keep later in the video — but a clip of the burning house challenge managed to go viral, inviting widespread condemnation.
“There’s something very dystopian about having someone run through a burning building for money and a YouTube video,” one user commented on X-formerly-Twitter.
Another remarked that Donaldson’s videos are “demeaning and exploitative,” adding that he’s “abusing people’s desperation to survive in a horrific economy where rent and grocery prices are astronomical.”
Responding to the outrage, the YouTuber insisted that the danger as only an illusion.
“If you’re curious obviously we had ventilation for the smoke and a kill switch to cut off the fires,” Donaldson posted on X. “We had professionals test this extensively and the guy in the video as stated is a professional stunt man. I take safety more serious than you could ever imagine.”
In his YouTube comments, Donaldson further explained that he had emergency rescue teams on standby, on top of an ambulance and fire engine. There was also a “pyro team controlling the fires,” as he put it, and “multiple fire suppression methods” on hand.
With the extreme lengths required to pull this off, it’s wild that nobody really thought to ask “is this worth it?”
But evidently for MrBeast, the price to scolding ratio is well in the green.
More on YouTube: MrBeast Brags About the Human Lives He Has Suspended in Bizarre “Simulations”