YouTuber MrBeast has said he will run for U.S. president if they lower the requirement age.
MrBeast—real name Jimmy Donaldson—holds the record for the most subscribers on YouTube, with 299 million followers at the time of writing. Forbes magazine said that, in 2022, he was earning $54 million a year, mostly from ads on his YouTube videos. Many involve viral stunts and challenges or massive giveaways, and he has also become known for giving back to his followers, often uploading videos of his charitable acts.
Now the 26-year-old has said he would run for president if the U.S. Constitution was changed. Currently, it stipulates that a candidate for president must be a citizen by birth, be at least 35 years old, and have lived in the country for 14 years. Qualifications for presidential candidates have remained the same since George Washington accepted the presidency in 1789.
"If we lower the age to run for president I'll jump in the race," MrBeast posted on X, formerly Twitter. At the time of writing, the post had been viewed more than 30.8 million times and liked over 568,000 times. Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for MrBeast for comment on Tuesday.
People took to the comments to ask the YouTuber questions about what his presidency would entail.
"Would you still make YouTube videos if you were president?" one person asked, to which MrBeast responded: "I'd probably focus on running the largest economy on earth."
"Are you sharp as a tack?" someone else queried, to which MrBeast said: "A tack fresh out of the box."
Others expressed their support for the idea, with one X user commenting: "You would be better than Biden & Trump for all we know."
"The funniest part about this is that you'd likely win," posted another.
However, other X users were less impressed by the idea, with one person writing: "Why would you make a good president? You're just a YouTuber."
"My one fear if you were ever prez [president] would be having to make bad decisions you got no control over. I feel like you're almost better off doing the good things u do away from that office LOL [laugh out loud]," someone else wrote.
"Tell everybody why you would jump in the race then," one person challenged.
A fourth added: "No thanks."
MrBeast's videos cost millions to produce, Rolling Stone magazine reported in 2022. One of his most popular, and most expensive, videos to create was a real-life recreation of Netflix's Squid Game. It has over 629 million views on YouTube and cost $3.5 million.
In a video that went live on June 29, MrBeast shared footage of himself giving away new houses to families in the Caribbean and Latin America who were shown to be living in damaged and substandard structures.
"With every single home we're building in this video, we're improving quality of life for families who don't have a safe space to call home," the social-media star said. "And we spent millions of dollars just on this video, building these houses."
However, his efforts in the nine-minute clip—titled "I Built 100 Homes and Gave Them Away!"—was met with criticism from a faction of social-media users.
MrBeast himself also spoke out against the criticism, writing in an X post on June 30: "When we help people (curing 1,000 blind people, building 100 houses, 100 wells, etc.) people get mad and say I shouldn't be doing this and governments should.
"Yes, ideally a YouTuber isn't the one fixing these issues, but I'm not just gonna stand by and do nothing," he added.
In his video, MrBeast and his collaborators were seen building new homes for families in Jamaica, El Salvador, Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. A number of the recipients were seen breaking down in tears as their new homes were unveiled.
In an address to his viewers at the end of the video, MrBeast said: "Shout out to you guys, because obviously if you didn't watch these videos, we wouldn't have been able to build 100 houses. And if the channel continues to grow, I hope to do 1,000 in the future."
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