The latest YouTube video stunt by one James “MrBeast” Donaldson has already wracked up over 46 million views in just one day and it’s not hard to imagine why. Titled “Would You Risk Dying For $500,000?” it shows a series of challenges in which people brave flame-engulfed obstacles in exchange for money. It’s kind of like David Blaine if, instead of doing absurd and wild stuff himself, he paid other people to do it while also explaining how it was all incredibly fake and just for grim lulz.
The infernal trap that’s been drawing the most attention is one in which a stuntman is tied to a chair inside a “burning house” and has to escape and save as much money as he can from inside the house in order to earn the highest cash prize possible. Donaldson bounces back and forth between urgent warnings about how real the flames are and mugging the camera with jokes about MrBeast product placement. The entertainment concept is more grotesquely mundane than anything Phillip K. Dick could have imagined and also, clearly, highly entertaining to millions of people.
This blew up, if you’re curious obviously we had ventilation for the smoke and a kill switch to cut off the fires. We had professionals test this extensively and the guy in the video as stated is a professional stunt man. I take safety more serious than you could ever imagine.
— MrBeast (@MrBeast) September 29, 2025
Donaldson defended his uniquely gifted intuition for creating the debased content people crave by promising the whole stunt was tested with professionals multiple times, responding to viral posts about the stunt with additional context. The last thing Donaldson needs after lawsuits last year over alleged safety violations on his Amazon Prime show is people thinking he doesn’t take the premise of potentially roasting another human being alive for less than the median home price after taxes seriously.
“We had professionals test this extensively and the guy in the video as stated is a professional stunt man,” he wrote on X over the weekend. “I take safety more serious than you could ever imagine.” He expanded on the setup in a comment on the YouTube video as well.
Content creators tend to think any spectacle is defensible if they can say health and safety concerns have been attended to behind the scenes, but that’s not really it imho. Mr. Beast’s whole thing is that his subjects’ desperation for cash allows him—a wealthier person—to indulge his sadism.
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social) 2025-09-29T12:45:09.235Z
“In case there’s any concern about the safety of the stuntman contestant, I just wanted to mention that we take safety extremely seriously,” he added. “Every challenge was tested by multiple stuntmen, we have a full rescue team on standby with firefighters, EMTs and divers equipped with an ambulance and fire truck. We also had a pyro team controlling the fires and multiple fire suppression methods on every challenge to ensure we could essentially turn off the fire if there was ever an issue. But our stunt coordinator did an amazing job as always, and none of these systems were ever needed. Just wanted to be transparent with you all since I saw some concern!”
This is the Catch-22 at the heart of this entire genre of extremely watchable algorithm-bait. Either the entire thing is so real and authentic that it’s an absolutely monstrous thing for everyone involved to be associated with and signals the utter depravity of modern capitalism, or the stunt is all so fake and performative that none of it matters and you’ve been conned out of 25 minutes of your week just so some guy can hock candy bars.
Either way, it kinda sucks!