It’s been a rough few months on the MrBeast front. YouTube‘s most-watched content creator has faced numerous allegations against himself and his businesses, including that contestants on his Amazon show Beast Games were mistreated, that he faked giveaways and charitable contributions, that his company has a history of workplace harassment and overworking employees, that slave labor is used to produce his chocolate brand Feastables, that he participated in crypto insider trading, and that the food safety standards for Lunchly, the Lunchables competitor he founded with Logan Paul and KSI, are low because mold was found in some of the meals.
MrBeast (aka Jimmy Donaldson) publicly addressed allegations against former friend/employee Ava Kris Tyson in July, and in a couple instances his team has issued statements defending him, but other than that, he’s remained largely silent about claims—including those from DogPack404, another former employee who’s made two lengthy videos full of allegations that Donaldson is a fraud who rigs his videos and a sociopath who treats his staffers poorly.
Donaldson broke that silence this week, sitting down for a nearly three-hour interview with fellow YouTuber Oompaville. The video chronicling their chat was uploaded just two days before Amazon released the first trailer for Beast Games, which debuts next month.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
To start the interview, Donaldson says he couldn’t respond to allegations until now due to a three-month internal investigation that was sparked by the grooming accusations against Tyson. The investigation concluded earlier this month, with investigators saying they found no evidence that Donaldson “knowingly” employed people with “proclivities or histories towards illegal or questionable legal conduct.” They did find “several isolated instances of workplace harassment and misconduct,” though, according to Donaldson’s lawyer Alex Spiro.
In response to investigators’ findings, Donaldson reportedly fired several employees and is looking for a new CEO to lead the MrBeast brand.
Donaldson also told Oompaville he’s not free to speak about everything just yet; he’s facing several ongoing lawsuits, including a class action from Beast Games contestants, and can’t talk about some allegations since they may be hashed out in court.
He did, however, reiterate a previous statement from his team saying the CrowdStrike shutdown affected Beast Games‘ production, denied that his team refused to allow trade unions on set, and said “I think in general, a lot of [the allegations] have just been blown out of proportion.” He also denied that contestants sustained broken bones and injuries on set, calling those claims “disinformation.”
As for the various allegations from DogPack404, Donaldson says he’s “probably gonna have to” sue the former employee.
“There’s tons of examples of him intentionally manipulating things to not be true,” he told Oompaville. He added that DogPack404’s allegations have “caused a lot of harm to my business,” and that “I’ve literally had people pull out millions of dollars and tell me that it was because of his videos.”
Donaldson said the impact of DogPack404’s videos has been so extensive he had to fire employees due to lost revenue.
We here at Tubefilter have noticed Donaldson posting fewer sponsored videos over the last couple of months. His channel also saw a significant drop in the number of subscribers gained month over month:
- In June (when he surpassed former PewDiePie rival T-Series and became YouTube’s most-subscribed-to channel), he gained 28 million new subscribers
- In July (when allegations against Tyson and Beast Games surfaced), that number dropped to 14 million
- It sank again to 6 million in August, and 5 million in September
Donaldson’s channel views also dipped, but then climbed back up again:
- June: 3.2 billion
- July: 2.5 billion
- August: 1.9 billion
- September: 2 billion
- October: 2.5 billion
So, from what we can see, Donaldson’s not hurting for AdSense revenue—but if he did lose millions of dollars in brand deals, that’s a significant portion of his income.
Donaldson also addressed the insider crypto trading allegations surfaced by blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence and covered by Coffeezilla (who later said he’d sent questions for Donaldson to Oompaville).
For his investigation, Coffeezilla looked at blockchain addresses associated with Donaldson and alleged Donaldson used his brand to promote digital currencies like SuperVerse during presale, and then sold them off in classic crypto pump-and-dumps that had him making over $10 million.
“We have leaked screenshots showing MrBeast telling Super’s founder that he can do $100K,” Coffeezilla said in his video, published earlier this month. “We have a wallet that both investigations traced to Mr Beast sending $100,000 to the presale wallet. We have the same wallet getting millions of these Super tokens in a period of unlocks which were almost all sold aggressively.”
Donaldson’s explanation? He wasn’t personally involved in any of those transactions.
“It was managed by a fund. So I wasn’t the one managing the wallet,” he told Oompaville. “I’ve never had access to the wallet, I’ve never done the buying and selling in that wallet. […] I make videos, I’m running seven businesses, I have a lot going on. I invested in a crypto fund, they invest on my behalf.”
“I mean, there are thousands of transactions on there,” he said. “Like, I don’t even have that kind of time.”
Donaldson also addressed the Lunchly and Feastables complaints:
- About Lunchly, he says “every single Lunchly with cheese is USDA inspected, there is no mold when it leaves our factory. We have the highest [quality control] standards imaginable.”
- About Feastables: “Not only 100% of Feastables’ beans Fair Trade Certified, but 100% of them, we also pay a Living Income Reference Price. This is why it’s hilarious that people are claiming we unethically sourced our cocoa. Everyone who said I used slave labor, I hope you delete your videos because you were spreading severe disinformation.”
As we mentioned, this interview was posted just two days before the first trailer for Beast Games went out on Amazon’s social channels. The 48-second teaser promises high-octane, neon-lit action, with monster trucks, fireworks, helicopters, and a “life-changing” $5 million prize to be won by one of 1,000 contestants.
So far, the teaser has netted around 23,000 views on Amazon’s official channel, which notably has comments turned off. Over on the Amazon UK & IE channel, though, comments were left on, and are flooded with negative responses. Amazon has yet to issue its own
Beast Games premieres Dec. 19.
