I don't think he's flaunting wealth per se. He doesn't claim to be wealthy. If anything he claims the opposite, always talking about how he immediately reinvests everything and keeps barely anything for himself or as a reserve.

But he is definetly flaunting something. I'd maybe label it as flaunting generosity, or the ability to change people's lifes

He's been involved with enough actual crypto scammers that it's probably more than a superficial similarity.

I don't know much about him, but he does lots of stuff about bringing water to places in Africa and curing blindness or deafness as well from what I've seen. Not sure of the ratio of what to what.

This was his older content. Ever since his squid game video his videos are larger-than-life with elaborate sets, flying to crazy destinations, etc. The simple giving cars away, or giving a house to a pizza delivery guy, or reading the bee moving script is long over.

One point about giving away cars - it’s not always to someone else’s detriment. He once gave someone ~30 used cars and they had to give them all away (to friends, family, randoms) within 24hours to earn a Tesla for himself.

In a weird way he is turning into the squid game villain himself. He stole their look for his henchmen and also takes on the persona. Almost every video he has made since would fit right in that world.

That and a mix of Willy Wonka.

The reeks of someone who has watched clout-chasing rage bait videos on Mr. Beast, but never actually watched Mr. Beast.

I'm confused. Is your problem the giving away of cars, or that the receiver's friends don't also get cars?

thank you

I've been overly aggressive blocking channels on youtube whenever i click on shit like that by accident and my recommendations are mostly safe.

Just go into watch history and delete the video. Or pause watch history before playing

In the case of MrBeast it's not even really reputation laundering, he's just an algorithm goblin who iterated through different shticks until landing on giveaways and contests as the things which consistently brought in the most clicks. I don't think he was even that rich when he started doing them, as far as I can tell his first ever prize was just two $50 iTunes gift cards while still recording in his bedroom, and after that it wasn't long until nearly all of his content revolved around giveaways.

The whole operation is optimized to the gills for maximum engagement above all else, down to A/B testing a hundred different thumbnail variants for every video: https://x.com/Creator_Toolbox/status/1783995589543227402

It’s not that difficult to become a billionaire. If you can collect $1 dollar from a billion people, you’ll be a billionaire. If you increase that to $10, you only need 100 million people, roughly a third of the United States.

What you need is some kind of platform on which you could collect those dollars. In recent history the internet has become a powerful platform and that is why we have so many more billionaires.

But what has not changed is our sensitivity to good deeds. If you’re a billionaire, giving all your wealth away is not really going to be appreciated much more than doing some highly visible good deeds that give smaller amounts of wealth away. So why do it? There is diminishing returns for good deeds. You’re better off staying a billionaire until you die, after which your wealth will be distributed anyway.