The MrBeast and the Burden
The MrBeast and the Burden
With friends like these, why would MrBeast need enemies?
If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time since 2012, you’ve probably seen Jimmy Donaldson. If you have young kids, then I’m almost positive that you’ve seen his weird, awkward, half-baked and stunted smile At least once. The name might be unfamiliar to you, but I’d reckon you’ve most likely heard of his internet nom de guerre, MrBeast. And, no - there is no period missing, there. That’s how it’s spelled. Mr-no-period-Beast.
Get it? Got it?
Good.
Donaldson is a figure I’ve been wanting to cover for some time, now. While his content offers little in value to me, and I’ve never once sat down and watched anything he’s ever made in its entirety, I find him deeply intriguing nonetheless. While Donaldson’s back story and larger, gradual ascendancy from a no-name military brat/that one weird kid at church in a middling North Carolina burb to one of the most prominent online figures of the 2020’s are worthy of a deep dive unto themselves, it’s not really what we’re here to talk about.
Since beginning his online content creation career in 2012 at the young age of thirteen, MrBeast has gone from making humble Let’s Play-style videos of himself and his friends playing video games to a major online personality that blurs the line between content creator, influencer, business mogul, and idiot savant. In 2023, Donaldson was listed in annual Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People round-up.
It’s easy to quibble over the relevance of a propaganda rag like Time Magazine and the dubious quality any title they might deign to give, but it is unquestionably an impressive feat to go from recording videos of oneself playing Minecraft at thirteen to the cover of one of the most widely circulated publications in the world. Whether or not you care much what Time Magazine has to say about the man, they aren’t wrong when they say that he’s someone who commands an immense amount of influence.
Currently, MrBeast’s primary YouTube channel boasts more subscribers than anyone on the site at any time in it’s history. At present, he has over 306 million subscribers - a number that’s only thirty million short of the population of the United States. On TikTok, he is the third most followed individual on the platform. Collectively, his videos have tens of billions of views. Not millions. Billions. With a B.
He has his own line of chocolate bars, which has gradually been expanding into a larger brand of snack foods labeled Feastables.
Are they good? Hell if I know. I don’t normally eat sweets, especially whole chocolate bars, so I’ve never felt the urge to buy one. But, given the fact they’re sold at grocery retails world-wide, he must be doing something right.
He launched a fast food brand that… well, that’s a debacle that messier than his grotesque Beast Style Fries to cover another time.
Regardless of the quality of the food - or lack thereof - he did it, and it’s now a service that’s expanded to over seven countries world wide. Whether he likes it or not.
He has a sponsorship deal with the Charlotte Hornets, a team in the National Basketball Association.
He has a deal with the fried chicken chain, Zaxby’s, where you can get a MrBeast box because after that dumbass Travis Scott meal made McDonald’s mad cash, I guess everyone has to ape it.
If you’ve never heard of Zaxby’s, it’s probably because you don’t live in the American south, where it spread like a bad rash over the past decade or so. It’s alright. I’d say it’s the second most over-rated Southern fried chicken fast food chain, only because Raisin’ Canes exists.
Seriously, people - it’s not that good. Are we as a society ready admit that? Can we just finally be honest with ourselves already? Their oh-so special Cane’s sauce is literally just thousand island dressing. You can make it at home with mayonnaise and ketchup. Get the fuck over it1.
Just this year in 2024, he scored a lucrative sponsorship with Amazon Prime, which is producing and streaming a game show of his creation called Beast Games.
Hell, in 2023, MrBeast was invited to go on a little ocean voyage by a certain company that was looking to get him to hype up their services, and take a ride on their submersible called the Titan to take him down and see the wreckage of the Titanic.
I think he made the right call politely declining the offer.
Most notably, MrBeast achieved widespread notoriety and praise for blending his content with philanthropic work, founding the organizations #TeamTrees and #TeamSeas, which respectively work towards goals of reforestation and cleaning garbage from the ocean, and both of which have met with considerable success and raised tens of millions of dollars a piece in charitable donations. Just a week or two ago as of this writing, MrBeast announced that #TeamSeas had cleaned over thirty four tons of garbage from waterways across the world, while #TeamTrees original goal of planting twenty million trees across North America, attracting large donations from basically every YouTube personality of any repute as well as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and Twitter-buyer, Elon Musk.
This is to say nothing of his general charitable organization, Beast Philanthropy - and, no, he’s not very creative with these names, I know - which has undertaken numerous endeavors to feeding the needy in his home state of North Carolina to drilling over one hundred water wells in Kenya to supply clean drinking water to remote villages; a move that made a surprising amount of people angry, because apparently someone paying for impoverished rural Africans to receive clean, sustainable sources of water is a case of White Saviorism, which makes an otherwise net positive contribution to the wold an inexplicable net negative. Or so I’m told.
While other, more questionable criticisms have swirled around Donaldson since the beginning of his career, I think it would be disingenuous to say that MrBeast has not done some good for the world. One of the most common aspersions cast against Donaldson is that his charitable work are little more viral stunts designed to get attention and, more importantly, money, by milking his good deeds for the camera. And, if that is the case, I really have to ask… so? Even if Donaldson only built those water wells in Kenya to stroke his own ego and rack up views on YouTube, it doesn’t change the fact that those people now have reliable sources of clean water. Do you really think those Kenyans are sitting around saying, God, I know we finally have clean water for our village, but I can’t believe he used us for views.
I tend to doubt it.
Now, not to do a violent 180 turn in direction and give you whiplash or anything, here, but one of the most fascinating things about Donaldson, in my opinion, are the striking similarities between his rise and the roughly concurrent ascendancy of another figure that maintains a similar stranglehold on the American cultural conscious, albeit in a different realm of entertainment.
Taylor Swift. Tay-Tay. T-Money. Whatever you want to call her. I’m tired of hearing about her, too, but, just humor me, here. It may seem ridiculous to compare a YouTuber-cum-Wonka-Wannabe to the single biggest name in the music business, if not all of entertainment, at present, but trust me - I’m not crazy.
Both Swift and Donaldson were not unknown before the lock-downs of 2020. They were, in their own ways, exorbitantly successful, much more so than most others in their fields of work could ever hope to be. I imagine most folks in the music industry would sign a contract in blood with the Devil himself just for a fraction of pre-2020 Swift’s starpower. More than a few of them probably have. However, as the post-pandemic epoch kicked off, both Swift and Donaldson experienced a similar meteoric take-off to super stardom in their respective spheres that they’re both still riding as I write this now, all borne on the backs and carried slavishly by teeming legions of adoring fans that cannot stand to here a critical word spoken of them. Just like you see hordes of thirty-something year old Millennial women sobbing their eyes out at a Swift concert, you’ll see throngs of teens and children gathering at Donaldson’s public events in such numbers that you’d think he just cured a leper with no more than a touch.
Just as Ms. Swift is the preeminent pop star of the Post-COVID era, Jimmy Donaldson is not just the biggest YouTuber - he is the YouTuber.
Both Swift and Donaldson, through shrewd personal business acumen that verges on preternatural (and no small amount of help of an army of dedicated public relations and marketing teams), have built very similar brands for themselves. The Taylor Swift brand is Taylor Swift. Likewise, the MrBeast brand is not just a brand - it is Donaldson, and Donaldson is the brand. They aren’t just the performers; they’re the product.
And if you’re selling a product, the old saying say that goes no publicity is bad publicity.
This is a statement I whole-heartedly disagree with. And part of the reason for that is the storm of allegations currently enveloping the House that MrBeast built. But, before you start to jump to conclusions, just know that these allegations - at least, for now - are not directed at the Big Beast himself.
Donaldson’s videos have long been spectacles unto themselves. He graduated from playing Minecraft with his buddies and shooting reaction videos to viral clips into more effort-heavy challenges that routinely require extensive time, expansive resources, boatloads of cold, hard cash, and more importantly, people. Obviously, you can’t afford to just hand out bands of cash to random homeless people loitering in front of 7/11's if you don’t have bands of cash to throw around. And you don’t get bands of cash to throw around all by your lonesome… usually. If anyone does know how to do that, be sure to drop a comment. Inquiring minds want to know.
Currently, MrBeast employs over 250 staff at his Greenville, North Carolina-based studio. As it is, Donaldson has gone to great and painstaking lengths to ensure that the reputation of both him, his studio, and those around him are spotless. Sterling. So squeaky fucking clean that you could eat off them. His employees are subject to iron-clad and meticulously detailed Non-Disclosure Agreements no doubt drafted by the most acute legal minds in the great state of North Carolina. So far as I know, outside of his main crew - and we’ll get to them, trust me - the rank-and-file peasants of the Barony of the Beast that keep the wheels moving have very little social media presence or, at the very least, are careful to keep their professional lives seperate from their online lives. You know - as it should be.
This is, I think, an understandable tack for Donaldson to take. The Empire of the Beast is built on the most unstable foundations when it comes to fan demographics. MrBeast is, first and foremost, supported by one group of people above all others.
Kids. Or, perhaps more apropos - their parent’s money.
This is not to say that MrBeast’s appeal does not transcend age and other boundaries. It does. Lots of teenagers on both ends of the spectrum love Donaldson and his content. Plenty of adults do, too. But kids? Oh, kids fucking love MrBeast. It’s not difficult to see why. From his quick, rapid style of video editing, employment of bright colors, over-the-top vocal inflection and now infamous cartoonishly overwrought expressions that only a child could take seriously -
MrBeast is the audio-visual equivalent of crack-cocaine to the generation of children raised staring at iPads with crippling cases of ADHD. He’s the veritable Mr. Rogers of the 2020’s. Like, just the other day I was at the grocery store and saw what had to be a ten year old wearing some MrBeast swag. While his mom was perusing the meats, he was carelessly busting it down, doing that one dance that I think is called the Orange Julius, or something. You know the one. You’ve probably seen some ten year old Fortnite addict geeked out on PRIME doing the same thing in your own local grocery store.
This is all to say that if you build your brand on children, you are building your empire on earth of tenuous integrity. Anyone with an even passing familiarity with children’s entertainment knows that keeping your nose clean is of paramount importance. Even in today’s age, where a lot of parents seem content to let their kids plop down in front of an iPad and let them melt their developing brains with YouTube Brainrot like this -
We’ll talk about it another day - if you’re a children’s content creator, professional or amateur, and you keep anything less than a finely fucking polished, platinum reputation? You’re cooked, brother. Those parents will see to it your kids never watch so much as another second of your content, and then, you’ll be dooming them to watch nothing but endless hours of poorly animated chicken nuggets farting and singing remixes of Cotton-Eyed Joe. Because somehow that’s better than letting them watch a guy who said fuck in a private conversation while he wasn’t on set or around children at all. There’s a reason the aforementioned Fred Rogers was so averse to smoking, drinking, and swearing. And it wasn’t just his religious convictions.
Didn’t stop him from givin’ the ol’ single finger salute every now and again, though.
That’s an unedited photo, just so you know.
Anyways, MrBeast is keenly aware of this little law of nature in the entertainment industries. While he’s had a few hiccups here and there, since, when you begin your online career at thirteen, you’re bound to say some… uncouth things at one time or another, he has, for the most part, kept his nose clean. And he’s been keen to make sure that his associates do, too.
At least, he tried.
This brings us to the actual topic of today’s discussion. You see, MrBeast’s entertainment empire was not built in a day. Neither did he build it alone. While Donaldson did much of the heavy-lifting to get it off the ground himself, and he is the integral, central Atlas-like figure upon who’s shoulders the entire enterprise rests… well, I’m obligated to make this joke at least once every year in an article, so, just roll your eyes now and get it out of the way; he got by with a little help from his friends.
Thank you, Mr. Starr, for ensuring I can never mention anyone doing anything with some assistance from someone else without thinking of this song. I really appreciate it.
Anyways, if Ringo had John, Paul, and George to help him out, MrBast had… the Beast Gang. Again - not the best with names, is he?
While the Beast Gang’s line-up, like any band that continues to plod along after their expiry date, has changed over the years, there have been some figures that proved more resilient than others.
When you look at the guys that MrBeast started out with, and kept around up until around 2016 or 2018, you notice that they seem… well, normal. I’d even go so far as to say that they look as if they have more than a couple of ounces of testosterone between them all.
By 2020, this had changed. Again, why most of the original members of the Beast Gang departed, I can’t say. Maybe they just got tired of being part of the group. Maybe there was behind the scenes drama I am not privy to. A few sources I found said they were fired, which, Christ - how do you get fired from making YouTube videos?
The lore of Lord Donaldson and his paladins is both esoteric and dense, and much of it is beyond me. But I do know that, as these guys went out, Karl Jacobs came in.
Once a humble cameraman employed by MrBeast, I guess he took a liking to the kid because he called him up to the big leagues to put down the camera and join him and his friends in front of it. If you couldn’t tell from the painted nails, weak chin, and stupid pose, Jacobs is… well, to put it nicely, a man’s man he is not. And, in a vacuum where all things are equal… that’s okay. Believe it or not, I’m no hypermasculine giga-chad myself. I’ll give you a minute for the shock to subside. I like to wear pink - sorry, salmon shirts, because it’s a nice, tasteful, pleasing color and fuck you I will die on that hill. I like to watch sports, but I never played them much. I prefer reading to lifting and should probably do more of the latter, and disco is not a dirty word to me. Whatever. You don’t have to be totally yoked or have a massive beard or some shit to be a man. If a beard was a prerequisite for being a man, these guys would all be men -
And I think we can all agree that is quantifiably not true. I don’t know what these debauched and debased creatures are, exactly, but they’re not men in any real sense of the term.
But from what I can extrapolate from my sources, being a effete is Karl’s bit. He’s shrill, he’s overemotional, prone to pouting when things don’t go his way, and generally acts like a petulant twelve year old even though he’s 26 years old. Oh, and he’s asexual. Apparently. If I had a kid watching MrBeast’s content, I would not really want them to decide the guy who prides himself on being the bitch boy of the group, or one who’s entire schtick is acting like a bratty twelve year old one, at that. Basically, Jacobs is the epitome of the soft sad boy archetype that’s been proliferating across the internet since, oh… 2018 or so? You know the type - the skinny-fat, whiny, sullen, and often histrionic type of guy who gets pissy any time there’s a joke at their expense and can’t take even the smallest amount of shit, always performatively depressed, only ever listens to lo-fi soundcloud tracks about suicide, usually has a crying anime boy as his profile, and is usually not too much fun to be around. The kind of guy who posts this kind of shit on his social media and, for some reason, expects people to take him seriously -
Which, apparently, they do, much to my perpetual confusion. I’d say that every group of friends has one of these types, but my friend group growing up didn’t. Not to sound like an old codger, but back in my day, we didn’t have these sadboy dorks that set their avatars to images crying anime twinks or wear those weird dangly cross earrings - we just had that one homie that had no light in his eyes and would make vaguely concerning statements at 3 AM in the group chat. The homie who you just knew wasn’t gonna make it.
I digress.
Karl Jacobs is one of the more endearing figures in the Beastverse because he’s popular with young women, who, for some reason, find his sensitive sad boy schtick appealing because he’s so #babygirl… or something like that. While doing research on Tumblr, I saw fanart where someone drew him pregnant. Not as a joke, or anything, it was some sort of fetish material made with complete sobriety. Because that’s a totally normal thing to draw.
No, I won’t share it here.
You’re welcome, by the way. Tips aren’t expected, but they are appreciated. Something’s gotta pay for the therapy I’m gonna need after doing all this research, y’know?
But, like I said - Karl’s a snivelly little dweeb that probably spent a lot of time locked in a locker back in high school, but he doesn’t seem like a bad guy.
Which, finally, brings us to the subject of today’s article, about whom the same can most definitely not be said.
This is Ava Kris Tyson.
Prior to June of 2023, however, they were known by a different name; Chris Tyson.
The story of Jimmy Donaldson cannot be told without Tyson. When the two met exactly, I’m not sure, and no source seemed to have a concrete time, but Donaldson himself said that they’d been friends for fifteen years in an interview conducted in 2023. Tyson was there from the beginning. It was with Tyson that Donaldson created his first YouTube channel and filmed his first videos. Tyson, he says, was his first subscriber. The two, by all accounts, have been close for a long time. Since the start, he’s been there. A constant presence. In all those videos, with their hundreds of millions of views, Tyson is there, and will always be there.
Tyson was, for the most part, a persistent but unremarkable presence in Donaldson’s videos. He was always there and, according to what I’ve read, managed to ride Donaldson’s coattails into a moderately successful solo career as an influencer himself. Overall, though, he didn’t really make any waves outside of the fandom that had accrued around the Beastverse until he announced in 2023 that he… was now she. This, for obvious reasons, was a bump in the otherwise smooth road that Donaldson had traveled. A lot of people were not happy with this announcement for a myriad of reasons. But Donaldson stuck by his friend, publicly and vocally. I will say that, in the video where he and Tyson discuss the matter for their audience, Donaldson looks distinctly uncomfortable, but, if he did harbor secret reservations about his friend’s transition, he swallowed them and put on his trademarked soulless, dead-eyed grin for the camera.
As I said, Tyson’s transition was contentious for many reasons. More than a few parents of young and impressionable MrBeast fanatics weren’t alright with it. The fact that they weren’t alright with it was contentious in and of itself, because, naturally, anyone who didn’t think Tyson should have a seat at MrBeast’s round table was labeled transphobic. And, honestly… well, I don’t agree. That’s not true. I know people who are completely okay with transexualism, so long as it’s not in the media their children consume because it’s one of those sensitive subjects that an eight year old really isn’t capable of grasping. Look - right. Wrong. I’m not here to say their reservations were either or. I’m just stating the fact that parents really weren’t happy with Tyson’s new pronouns.
Others - namely a large portion of MrBeast’s older audience - did not like the drastic change in Tyson’s presence in Donaldson’s content and more so on social media. Again, I don’t watch MrBeast’s content, so I only have third-party accounts to go off, but, apparently, Tyson’s shift in demeanor was both jarring and off-putting to a not insignificant amount of viewers. Donaldson has always been keen to maintain strict political impartiality, I assume because, for one, having strong political convictions is bad for your brand, and, for another, I genuinely think he’s too dedicated to his craft of content creation to care about politics one way or the other. While he was on camera, Tyson kept a lid on his opinions, but on Twitter, Tyson became very vocal about their new progressive, liberal, and distinctly libertine outlook on life. Apparently, Tyson had previously been a very reserved and private individual. And that doesn’t seem to be so much the case post-transition. Being transgender wasn’t just a part of Tyson’s personality, it became Tyson’s personality. Needless to say, that also didn’t go over so well with long-time fans who just wanted to see him, her, whatever go back to bumming it with the Beast Gang like old times.
Outside of the parents of Little Beast Acolytes and MrBeast’s own audience, many impartial, third-party observers were very displeased by the fact he transitioned while married to his wife of five years. While they had a three year old son. And then divorced her.
Except that isn’t true.
In actuality, a month before Tyson publicly announced their transition, they stated on Twitter that they and their wife had been separated for over a year by that point. Like I said, the guy was a private person - no one outside of the Beast Gang knew this. So, the narrative that he slipped on a dress, changed his pronouns, and ran out on his wife and kid, despite being the most common perception of the events, is not how the timeline played out. But I still wouldn’t say that makes it okay.
This may be a lukewarm take, but, frankly, if a grown-ass adult really wants to transition… I don’t really care. I mean, I wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t ever condone it. I don’t think it’s good, either, but, at the same time, I say all the same thing about tattoos and it’s like… I dunno, man. Or wo-man, I guess. It’s your life. Probably not a good idea in the long term to go on hormones or get an anime character permanently inked onto your thigh, but I can’t stop you from doing it, if it’s really what you want to do.
But I also think that, when a kid’s involved in the situation, that opinion changes pretty radically. Mostly because it seems like putting yourself before your child, which should always be your paramount priority as a parent. Without question. Your wants should always come second to their needs. That’s kind of the arrangement you signed up for the moment you that your progeny popped out. And I feel the same way about divorce. If you have kids? Do your best to nut up, shut up, and put up with your dearly be-loathed for their sake, because I think we’ve all seen what living through a divorce can do to a child, and it is not pretty. I’ll admit - that’s easy for me to say, given I’m not married, but that’s the way I see it.
At the time, Twitch streamer Nickmercs - co-founder of the highly popular e-sports and entertainment outfit, Faze Clan - made a video in which he stated the following;
Interestingly, an individual known as Jake the Viking - a former member of the Beast Gang who departed shortly before Karl’s induction to the crew - voiced his support for Nickmercs’ statement. Keep the name Jake the Viking pinned away for later. He’ll be important.
But, in response, Tyson’s ex-wife, Katie, replied with the following statement.
While it isn’t a full-throated defense of her ex-husband - ex-wife? - it isn’t a condemnation, either.
Outside of this, I can’t find much in the way of Katie making any other statements on the topic of her ex-husband’s transition, positive or negative. By all accounts, it seems that Tyson is still very much involved in their son’s life and, if they do have a sour relationship with their former spouse, neither of them are airing their grievances publicly.
To bring it back to the criticism leveled by Nickmercs, I remember that, at the time, I saw many, many young men on various platforms (understandably) bemoaning that Tyson had everything that the average young American man craves but is direly out of reach or so many of them. Success, money, a job they don’t hate and a house and a spouse and a child, to boot - I know plenty of guys, good guys, too, that would quite literally kill for some of those things, and here was Tyson, tossing it all away… for what?
Well - we’ll get to it.
Even today, one question that lingers low and dense above the entire ordeal is this - was Tyson’s transition the reason that he and his wife divorced? They may have only gone public with the transition a year after their private separation, but, for all anyone knows, it could have been something in the works well before they ever signed any papers. The fact that it’s constantly stated that Tyson publicly came out suggests that, behind closed doors, this information had already been disclosed to their closest associates.
The truth is that no one but Tyson and Katie know. And probably MrBeast. Maybe Karl, too. Okay, there’s probably more than just them, but anyone who does know isn’t sharing.
I don’t like to baselessly speculate, but I do suspect that the transition was a factor in his divorce, to some degree. According to sources in MrBeast’s fandom, there were… signs of what was to come. Subtle, small ones, but signs nonetheless. He developed a habit of painting his nails. He started shaving regularly and kept his face bare. Grew out his hair. Y’know. That kind of stuff.
I also can’t imagine that Tyson made the choice to transition on a whim and, one night, just woke up and thought, Today I will become a woman. It was most likely a decision Tyson made over a protracted period of time. I have to think that Katie, to some extent, knew what was coming, if she wasn’t fully aware of it from the beginning. Yet, Katie could support Tyson’s transition and still just not want to be married to them. That’s a very real possibility.
But… I think there’s a more to the story than just that. Truthfully, I think there was a much darker reason that Tyson and Katie split.
This brings us to today, where, less than a day ago as of this writing, Donaldson posted the following on X -
The serious allegations in question refer to screenshots of an explicit conversation between Tyson and a fourteen year old that surfaced in early July of 2024 on the forum, sometimes described as a hive of scum and villainy, KiwiFarms. It didn’t take long for commentary YouTubers - especially those that tend to cover the antics of the lolcows, which KiwiFarms specializes in documenting - to start a spark in the rumor mill. This ember, however, would sit and smolder for some time in obscurity, as it seemed that outside of a certain ring of niche YouTubers that hyper-focused on YouTube bitch-fit-fights and lolcows… no one seemed to care.
But, after a few days of smoldering in obscurity, at risk of being lost amid the perpetual hurricane of drama roiling across the greater internet, the story caught the attention of a certain over-sized garden gnome with a nose for controversy and a thirst for drama…
Daniel Keem. Anyone who knows Daniel Keem knows that he loves to stoke fires when he sees them. I think he’s biologically incapable of just walking away from a trash fire, and perhaps pathologically predisposed to jump into them headfirst. The guy literally runs the equivalent of a YouTube tabloid gossip rag on his channel, Drama Alert. The guy keeps a roof over his head by milking controversy. But when he heard about what Kris Tyson had done… well, this wasn’t just some passing drama to flap his gums about and pad time on his show.
The allegations that were leveled against Tyson? They made Keem mad. And it was personal.
So, Keem saw this spark in the rumor mill, went to get a jerry can of gasoline, and, the next day, that mill was burning to the ground. The story was quickly picked up by Tim Pool, Mutahar Anas of Some Ordinary Gamers, who we’ve talked about before, and others big fish in the YouTube pond that put enough eyes on the situation that it couldn’t be quickly and quietly resolved by the MrBeast team. By the end of July, the conversation would dominate YouTube and Tyson would be forced to flee the internet with their tail between their legs. In the aftermath, they scrubbed their social media… but not before the Poirot’s and Holmes’s and Columbo’s and Monk’s of KiwiFarms documented everything they needed to make the case that they should not be a part of polite society and, perhaps more damningly, MrBeast’s entire enterprise was not as epic heckin’ wholesome chungus 100% as he’s taken great pains to ensure it appears to be.
The Tyson allegations come only a month after the revelations concerning streamer, internet personality, and video game developer DrDisrespect - real name Guy Beahm.
Once one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, Beahm was mysteriously and permanently banned from the platform mid-stream in 2020 with no explanation from either himself or the site staff. He relocated his enterprise to YouTube, where he continued to met with success and milk an extremely lucrative branding deal with multiple companies and organizations until, in June of 2024, a Twitch employee disclosed that he was banned from the platform due to using the site’s direct messaging system to message a minor. Sexually. Because of fucking course he would. It seems like these fuckers just can't help themselves when it comes to sexting fourteen year olds. I feel like they need to be studied to find out what exactly about internet success apparently makes one predisposed to creeping on minors. Is it some sort of biological reaction to internet infamy? Does it just attract a certain type of personality? Is there some sort of chemical or hormonal change that flips a switch in their head and make them go, Well, time to ask a minor for nudes, once they hit a certain threshold? Really, I'd like to know.
Oh, and why the Twitch staff did not go to the police instead of just banning him, enabling him to continue his career with minimal repercussions despite him using their site to sexually texting a fucking fourteen year old, is a question that has yet to be adequately explained.
Within a day following the leaks, it was all over for Beahm save the crying. YouTube didn’t ban him, but they revoked his partnership with the site and made it clear he was no longer welcome on the platform. DLC in multiple games that featured his likeness or iconography was erased and refunds were given to players who bought them. He was fired from the game studio he founded. Every business that had ever slapped his logo on their products, from Gillette Razors to Game Fuel energy drinks, roundly denounced him and announced that any and all ties had been severed with him.
And, believe me - this was a big fucking deal in the streaming world, and even beyond. You may not have heard of him, but if it tells you how big DrDisrespect was as an internet personality, he had a branding deal with the San Fransisco 49ers2.
And, yeah - they dropped him like a flaming bag of dogshit, too. It was so bad they put out a statement on X dragging him for millions to see.
The point I’m making here is that, when it came out that DrDisrespect was disrespecting laws against fraternizing with minors, his career was dead in the water within roughly twenty four to forty eight hours of his dirty deeds surfacing. Public scrutiny was so bad that it managed to squeeze a confession of guilt out of Beahm.
Just think about how hot the pressure has to be to toast a fucking admission like this out of a guy? Especially one as famously brash, conceited, and unapologetic as DrDisrespect?
In the days following the allegations surrounding Tyson, many people have been asking the same question - just a month ago, DrDisrespect was so thoroughly thrashed by every corner of the internet that the guy will most likely be persona non grata for years to come.
Why was the same not happening to Kris Tyson?
It isn't just that Tyson isn't getting the same vehement, vicious backlash as DrDisrespect. He's got people actively supporting him. Even the alleged victim has come out in his defense. And, in my opinion, the allegations against Tyson are even more disgusting than those leveled against Beahm by a good country mile.
As more allegations continue to surface, more evidence of Tyson's impropriety is uncovered by internet sleuths on KiwiFarms, and old acquaintances from MrBeast's past rise from the shadows like haunting specters, I'm afraid that this is a question is one that we'll have to discuss… next time.
Apologies to all Caniacs in the audience.
Many curses be upon them.
Thanks for breaking all that down for us. I've seen the headlines all over but didn't look into it yet.
Yeah I instinctively don’t trust that overwrought grin coupled with dead eyes that he must think approximates a smile.