Right from the start, things seemed off. Some contestants said they had originally been told that the competition would have 1,000 participants. (This was also the figure advertised by Prime Video earlier this year.) But upon arrival, contestants received a video message from Mr. Donaldson, reviewed by The Times, informing them that the number of contestants was higher.

“Obviously, there’s 2,000 contestants,” Mr. Donaldson said in the video. “I don’t remember if I said that publicly or not, but there is.” A spokesperson for MrBeast said the intention had always been to have 2,000 competitors during that phase to winnow down to the 1,000 for the Amazon MGM show.

Honestly, it sounds like he decided that he didn’t want to hand everything off to Amazon and decided to double the contestants so he could post some shit on his YouTube. And then, having doubled the number of contestants, didn’t change any of the other preparations. If you work from that assumption, then a lot of the other stuff falls into place: there wasn’t enough food, there wasn’t enough medical attention, staff were pretty overwhelmed, etc. Not saying all of the problems came from there, but it sounds like a bunch of them did.

I’ll also add that there’s a clear lack of diversity on his planning crew. Any woman who spent five minutes thinking about it would’ve been advocating for a hygiene setup and would’ve pointed out that the women would be pushed out in that first scrum for jerseys. Real competition shows account for that shit.