What are they doing? They gave free cataract surgery to a huge number of people across the world, built wells, have distributed an ungodly amount of food and the list goes on. Just google the foundation and stop being grumpy. My bet is you will not be able to give away a tiny fraction of what they have in your whole life, even with all their flaws.
There's something off about doing it for profit though. And there's plenty of reporting out there that shows his philanthropy isn't all it's cracked up to be in many cases.
It's also silly to imply that simply doing some philanthropy somehow washes out anything bad you might have done. Often philanthropy is precisely a PR exercise to distract from that stuff.
idk what the ground truth is but what we are talking about here is called "fruit from the poisoned tree" in the field of ethics. This means you get a fruit "good thing" but it was pick from the poison tree "bad thing". And the ethical principle is that's not ethical, because bad thing
Spending $100k to make $1 million isn't philanthropy, it's a very low cost of revenue.
Meanwhile the entire point of "giveaways" and the lotteries he runs is so that children will beg mom and dad to buy them Mr Beast's garbage chocolate for a high price that tastes like ass for a hope that it contains a golden ticket like some sort of Capitalist Evil Willy Wonka.
They make profits with the business, as every single other business in the world. Unlike all other businesses though, they are a business that then funnels a significant chunk to philanthropy. How much has your favorite TV channel given away? Or your favorite book publisher? Or your favorite video game company? Or whatever businesses sell the entertainment you buy?
They certainly tricked a bunch of people into getting free homes, I bet those families are all crying about the fact that the company that gave them a free house makes money by making videos, they must be fuming.
Fallacy of consequentialism. Yes, tons of people got free cataract surgery but that's a band-aid solution to cataract surgery being artificially locked behind a paywall all those people were unable to bypass, and the paywall still exists and is still preventing multiple factors of that group from accessing the same surgery. And wells in the developing world has been a charity money sink for decades at this point, instead of asking "well where's the well you're going to build" why don't you ask "why do so many people all across the world lack clean water?"
And the answer to that question is that it's not profitable to provide clean drinking water to people who can't pay for it. Not that it's not possible, not that it's not a solved engineering problem, clearly it is because some fuckin YouTuber pony's up the cash and suddenly there's a goddamn well. The only reason it's not already there is because we decided someone has to pay for the problem to be solved, and if none of the people who need it solved can afford it, we let them continue drinking dirty water and die from preventable illness because they were born in the wrong income bracket.
And by the same logic, why does Mr. Beast have this money in the first place? Because he's making bullshit videos about """solving""" these problems, because presenting loud, stupid nonsense to a western audience, for free, so they can be showed video ads in the midst of it, is worth enough to pay for these fucking wells.
To make this completely fucking clear: the attention of a western, young audience who's parents have money to spend and may, MIGHT, influence them to buy a product, is worth more than providing clean fucking drinking water to entire villages of people who live in a non-western place, with enough leftover for Mr. Beast to draw a frankly unethical salary for what he's actually doing, and providing to the world. That level of inequity between two groups of people is the grand fucking canyon.
And, to make this other point extra clear, that's not Mr. Beast's fault. He's acting completely rationally within a system that has utterly lost the plot in terms of what actually has value. The fact that unhinged amounts of money are going to a frankly, by all accounts I can find, quite amoral man who has cracked the code for generating loud, obnoxious nonsense that children will consume on an industrial scale so equally morally bankrupt companies can shove advertisements down their eyeballs and convince them to buy shit they don't need, so much so that he can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make yet more loud, obnoxious bullshit, is the problem. All of this is so completely and thoroughly disentangled from any notion of what anyone actually needs, and the fact that tons of people on this board and elsewhere still manage to call this system the most rational economic system yet discovered while looking at this complete fucking nonsense is astonishing to me.
That's great that you've figured out all the problems of the world, but I was simply answering "what have they done" to a mis-characterization that they are simply time-wasting machines.
They are time wasting machines. YouTube is, and Mr. Beast's production company is by virtue of the fact that it would die immediately if YouTube went away, because nobody would buy that shit in a theater, on a blu ray, or in iTunes Store. Same reason TikTok and it's associated content is also bullshit, literally the only reason anybody watches that garbage is that it's free.
I bet you don't apply this level of rigorous criticism to books or musicians, even though they occupy time that could be better spent curing malaria or arguing about Ukraine on the internet. Why not?
I'd argue it's more than "that it's free", it's that it's tuned to push our buttons. Specifically, it's designed to engage (e.g. generate enragement, outragement, or some similarly powerful emotional response). And the only barrier to getting a hit of this emotional stimulant is a mere click.
