A new theme park is coming to Saudi Arabia thanks to MrBeast

Bill Gates has to be our worst billionaire.  He started the Gates Foundation to fix intractable problems so everyone would love him.  He managed to jam himself into tough problems, screw things up, then move on to the next problem.  Just unbearable.

MrBeast is trying something fun.

I know little about MrBeast, and can’t be arsed to find out.  He isn’t for me, and that’s fine.  For our purposes, here is the important part.

MrBeast is a 27 year-old guy who didn’t start out rich, but now has 700 million followers on Youtube, and makes about that many dollars per year.  His channel features outlandish or silly challenges that draw more viewers than everyone else in the world.  That sounds pretty good.

With the general technology explosion in the last several decades, many people rapidly became billionaires.  The rest of us know who they are and how they got started.  I’ve met a half-dozen of them.  Because they are not old money oligarchs or brutish industrialists, they seem like accessible people with vast new wealth.  It’s interesting what they do with it.

Bill Gates got rich with Microsoft.  He channeled his money into his charitable foundation.  The world would have been better off if he’d spent that money to make Windows not suck.

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and some other billionaires take on large-scale technical challenges that match their interest and competence.  They make more money as they benefit the world by expanding our capability.

Mark Zuckerberg tries to act like a regular human, but he isn’t sure how he got $250 billion, and isn’t sure he can keep it. 

MrBeast, as far as I know, doesn’t have an extraordinary background or technical expertise .  He became obsessed with Youtube as a young teen, and as he built an audience, put the money back into the channel to produce more of the content that he found interesting.  It worked.

MrBeast is branching out.  He is building a theme park not affiliated with a major studio or corporate media.  At this scale, it’s something we’ve never seen before.  It sounds like a worthwhile experiment, and if it works, others will try it.

Building the park in Saudi Arabia is an interesting choice. 

Riyadh and the Saudi royals want this, so MrBeast will get the government cooperation that he couldn’t get anywhere else.  MrBeast won’t deal with the government trying to extract vast tax revenue or government and local corruption trying to get a slice of cake.

When I have visited national parks, most of the foreign tourists were from Western Europe or from China or Japan in the East.  Saudi Arabia is in between.  Those tourists have the money and time to go to Saudi Arabia. 

MrBeast isn’t mind kind of entertainment, but he seems creative and ambitious.  He is trying something new, so maybe he will change the world a little bit.