The Backlash to MrBeast’s Cruel, Dystopian ‘Beast Games’ Will Be Brutal

Putting aside the well-documented allegations of widespread mistreatment, sexual harassment, and unpaid expenses tied to The Beast Games—and ignoring whatever personal revulsion one might feel toward the nauseatingly self-aggrandizing “altruism” of YouTube’s golden boy, MrBeast — the series itself is a pathetic, sweaty, dystopian trainwreck. As host, MrBeast radiates all the charisma of wet bread, playing the part of a brain-damaged Willy Wonka by way of the horror movie Smile, gleefully flexing his wealth (and Amazon’s) to stage spectacles of manufactured cruelty.

The supposed draw here is the $5 million cash prize, but even that undersells the stakes. MrBeast hands out $2 million in the first two episodes alone, with payouts meticulously engineered to reward a small number of self-serving contestants at the expense of everyone else. It’s a twisted, Hunger Games-esque social experiment—streaming on a platform that thrives on pushing its subscribers to consume more while exploiting its workers into oblivion.

Take the very first game, for instance: any of the 1,000 contestants can walk away with a share of $1 million if they quit. Sounds generous, right? But here’s the catch: if only one person drops out, they get the whole million. If 10 people quit, it’s $100,000 each. The more desperate souls who opt out, the smaller their slice of the pie. Naturally, this pits the contestants against each other right out of the gate, as everyone’s sweaty desperation and blind hope for $5 million overrides rational thought. And because there are so many players, we learn absolutely nothing about them beyond their willingness to humiliate themselves for a prize they’ll likely never see.

Therein lies the real cruelty: the illusion of choice. Contestants cling to the belief that their grit or skill will get them to the top, so they turn down staggering sums of money—life-changing sums like $100,000 — to stay in the game. But the eliminations? Mostly random. It all hinges on arbitrary factors or the capricious decisions of others.

Take one round where a row of 80 contestants must convince one person to “self-sacrifice” so the others can move forward. If no one steps up, the entire row is eliminated. Another round splits players into groups of eight, offering exponentially increasing sums of money. If anyone in the group takes the money (which skyrockets to $100,000), the rest are eliminated. So, seven people’s dreams are crushed because they had the bad luck to share a row with someone who dared prioritize a life-saving sum of cash over seven strangers. Greed? Or just a basic survival instinct? Either way, the system is rigged to create scapegoats and drama for views, while those eliminated are left devastated, dropped into trap floors like dominoes while a gleeful MrBeast looks on.

This, of course, is the entire point. MrBeast doesn’t care about changing lives or creating “generational wealth.” He’s a content-creator oligarch, dangling obscene amounts of money like a sadistic carrot to exploit human desperation for clicks. It’s Squid Game wrapped in a benevolent package. He wants us to see him as some philanthropic genius, but he’s just another asshole with too much money and no sense of decency, reveling in his ability to toy with the poors for sport.

It’s another reflection of our oligarchic society, where the wealthy few hoard obscene fortunes while the rest scramble for scraps. And the backlash is already brewing. You can feel it — like the rumblings before a #MeToo-style reckoning for the ultrawealthy. When that day comes, MrBeast and his exploitative circus will be Exhibit A. The Beast Games isn’t just a grotesque symptom of wealth inequality; it’s the kind of dystopian artifact historians will point to as proof of how far we let things spiral.