I investigated Mr. Beast, who was recently accused of making $23 million with insider trading and scams. I wanted to know the full story, so I reached out to everyone, from researchers to crypto projects, even to Mr. Beast himself. And let me say, the story is more complicated than you think.
I want to be clear, what Mr. Beast did, what his team did, is shady. But what we care about is, did he cross that bright red line from shady to... illegal scam. And contrary to what Twitter says, I don't think that's an easy answer.
Instead, I think the answer will depend on you. If you love Mr. Beast, there will be an explanation at every turn and a scapegoat. But if you hate Mr. Beast, what I'm about to show you will seem unethical and like a clear abuse of fame for money. So already this story is difficult, but I want to make you aware of two more things which matter. First, I have gone to Mr. Beast's theme.
to try to fact-check this story extensively, and they declined to fact-check or comment on my many questions. Instead, they gave me a statement, which we will get to. Secondly, I have a bit of history with Mr. Beast.
I interviewed and spoke positively about him in the past, but also his new co-founder is suing me, and his other co-founder threatened to sue me. So you can make of that what you will. As always, I just want to let you know where I'm coming from, and I've tried to get all sides. of the story.
We're going to start with the major allegations against Mr. Beast and build on those. They come from two sources. Firstly, an investigation by SomaXBT, which claims Mr. Beast made $10 million by backing low cap crypto tokens, which are down 90%.
And the second investigation comes from a group of five people who investigated Mr. Beast and found $23 million in profits from, quote, scams, shady deals, and his network. Now, There are a lot of crypto projects they go over, and I want to be clear. Some of these allegations I agree are bad. Others I think are actually worse than have been reported.
And still other allegations I simply disagree with them on. So we're going to start with what I don't agree with. According to the report, Polychain Monsters, or PMON, is a project which KSI promoted heavily.
MrBeast did not. But MrBeast did. did get in the pre-sale and make a lot of money.
And thus, the conclusion is made, it's highly likely Mr. Beast made an investment from that insider information of KSI's promotional deal. But there's simply no evidence provided of this. I have the same thoughts about Jigstack, another coin which KSI promoted.
And the conclusion is, though Mr. Beast did not officially follow Jigstack, in his network, KSI was involved in promoting Jigstack. From this information, Mr. Beast invested and made a large return. Here again, there isn't concrete proof.
Now, I asked the team who wrote this piece, and the lead author, Casper Vandalook, told me, quote, having known Mr. Beast's having a very strong connection with KSI, it's basically highly probable he was vested as a result of KSI. No concrete evidence, just going off probabilities. But I'm going to say I don't agree with that, and I'm going to toss those probabilities aside.
I think they reach too far. Instead, I'm going to stick with what we can prove happened. Luckily, the biggest claims in this report, the biggest money makers, are much better supported by evidence.
Starting with Super. This is the project MrBeast is alleged to have made the most amount of money on, over $10 million, based on a pre-sale of $100,000. As for evidence, we have leaked screenshots showing MrBeast telling Super's founder that he can do $100K.
Then we have a wallet that both investigations traced to MrBeast, sending $100K to the pre-sale wallet. And then we have the same wallets getting millions of these super tokens in a period of unlocks, which were almost all sold aggressively. Now, why is this bad? Well, Mr. Beast is obviously hugely influential, and he publicly associated himself with the project twice.
Once on March 3rd, 2021, he responded to a tweet with eyeball emojis. And then he interacted a second time on May 12th, 2021. This is much worse. The founder, Elio Trades, had tweeted, There's a gym sitting there on the market at eye-watering prices set to explode during the DeFi summer 2.0. MrBeast responds, super?
But what he doesn't say is that he'd already purchased a huge stake in super at this point. And on the day that he's tweeting, he was selling tokens, allegedly. Not only that, he had been selling tokens and continued to sell tokens.
In the 72 hours after the May 12th tweet, MrBeast sold about $200,000 worth of these tokens. And remember the context. He's responding to the founder of the coin discussing a gym at eye-watering prices that's going to explode during the summer. And Mr. Beast's response is the coin he's selling.
So publicly, it's signaling, hey, super is this undervalued coin. And privately, Mr. Beast allegedly sold. Now, I ran these wallets by Mr. Beast, as well as the accusation.
But I didn't get a reply. Instead, I got a heavily lawyered statement from a spokesman who I'm going to warn you is about to complicate things. Quote, these investments were made and managed in consultation with industry experts to ensure full compliance with all appropriate rules and regulations. The wallet is not owned or managed by Jimmy, but rather a fund led by respected and sophisticated managers. The fund closely evaluated and scrutinized hundreds and hundreds of opportunities for which resulted in several investments.
Some have been more successful, others less, and others still works in progress. The fund's investment strategies apply the same rigorous standards as many other experienced investors in the field. Now, I have a lot of questions, but the big thing is Jimmy denies doing any of the trading or managing the trading and blames it on a fund. So I asked some obvious follow-up questions.
What is the name of this fund? Who are the industry experts? And what rules and regulations were followed? that allowed you to tweet about a coin while your fund is selling. I didn't get a response.
It's worth mentioning the spokesman is Matthew Hiltzik, a well-known crisis management consultant. Thankfully, online, there still are a number of clues we can follow to try to find the right person for this fund. The reason most people link MrBeast to this wallet we've been tracking is mostly based on a tweet by MrBeast saying he bought a specific crypto punk, which belonged to an account which goes by WuTangClan. People assumed, understandably, that this was MrBeast's wallet. But what is lesser known is that another account has also tweeted about CryptoPunks and has the same ties back to Wu-Tang Clan.
A guy named Jason Williams. He's followed by MrBeast on Twitter. And he's the author of a book on Bitcoin, so he's a crypto guy. And I found Jason tweeting about another CryptoPunk saying, I hope you enjoy your new home sold for 100 ETH. That sale he's talking about.
links back to the same address MrBeast does, Wu-Tang Clan. On YouTube, there's even more clues. Jason can be seen surfing wearing a Wu-Tang Clan shirt, and his brand name, Going Parabolic, happens to be owned by the same MrBeast wallet, GoingParabolic.eth. So there's very good evidence that Jason Williams was also involved in this same wallet, which means that it might be true that MrBeast wasn't the guy buying or selling.
which would be good for MrBeast and bad for these investigations. But just when I thought MrBeast might have no say in what this wallet did, I saw this podcast with Logan Paul, where Jimmy discusses CryptoPunks once again and things get complicated. I also saw me and Logan both bought punks.
You guys have probably seen on this Twitter that he bought a bunch of CryptoPunks at the same time. Right. Gary pulled us in that call. Yeah. So have you ever told that story?
No. Gary Vee. It's like 11 p.m. just out of nowhere.
just calls me and he's like yo i got like 30 people to call hop in i'm like i don't care he's like it'll be the best decision of your life just get in yeah okay yeah and so i just joined the call yeah i just see like logan and I don't even know these other people. I don't put them up last. Every heavy hitter you can imagine who's worth a billion dollars was on this one call.
And Gary Vee is in the little corner, the little square. He's going, CryptoPunks. It's going to be huge.
It's going to be the next Facebook. All of us were like, okay, Gary. I'm texting Logan.
Is this legit? All of us are like, yo, Gary's nuts. Yo, Gary was right again. I bought a bunch.
Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, I bought quite a few. How many? Uh, I don't want to say, but I bought multiple ones. Yeah.
Well, bro, are you double digits punks? Uh, double, just shy. Huh? Well, this clip is very interesting because Jimmy said he made the decision to get CryptoPunks based on a call with Gary Vee.
But those punks are owned by the wallet we just said was controlled by Jason. So it appears sometimes Mr. Beast is telling Jason what to buy for this fund. Mr. Beast.
then later talks about selling these CryptoPunks and rolling the money into a new project. And once again, it sounds like he's in charge. Well, I've already sold quite a few of them. What?
He's on to the next thing. I bought a bunch of, so then I rolled the money into VFriends because Gary, same thing, called me. He's like, VFriends. I was like, I don't know, but last time I made money, so sure. I'll be honest.
These clips to me make it difficult to assume MrBeast had no idea what's going on. He talks about CryptoPunks and VFriends like personal investments. And on Twitter, he says that not only he bought CryptoPunks, he also tweets about loading up on VFriends.
But again, I have to say, it is also abundantly clear Jason Williams was involved. He says, hey, Gary, thanks for the VFriends gift goat. It was a gift from Gary to Mr. Beast.
I'm very thankful for it. He didn't have to send anything. So once again, Jason Williams appears to be involved and have something to do with the trading or management of MrBeast's crypto wallet, but we know MrBeast made some of the decisions. So of course, I asked MrBeast to explain himself if he had any say over the trading, but once again, there's no response. So now I want to turn back to Super.
We know from leaked DMs that MrBeast and not Jason set up this pre-sale, and we know that MrBeast made the tweet. So now we have to guess. Here's what we know. We know MrBeast set up the pre-sale. According to leaked screenshots, we know MrBeast made the tweet, but we don't know whether it was Jason doing the trading of Super or if he was doing the trading, did MrBeast know about it?
Did Jason know about the tweet? These are the questions that ultimately matter. And yes, I reached out to Jason Williams for a comment.
He didn't reply. I did, however, get a hold of Elio Trades, who is the founder of Super, and he and insisted that Mr. Beast's tweet was not a part of a deal for promotion. But you should know he also mentions how upset he was with how pre-sale investors sold their tokens, saying most of them sold, including Mr. Beast.
So those are the facts. Mr. Beast gets involved in a pre-sale, for some reason tweets at this project twice, one time on the day his fund is selling tokens, where he seems to imply that they're undervalued. In total, he's alleged to have made $11 million with this deal, according to the report.
So yeah, that's really bad. Now we're going to turn to another allegation, which is about Earn or Eternity Chain. There are some facts which are the same. There are others that are different.
For example, instead of Mr. Beast setting up the deal directly, the team at Earn claims they never spoke to Mr. Beast. Quote, we were speaking to his fund manager. And when I asked about these wallets. selling allegedly over $4 million in tokens, they say, quote, Mr. Beast's fund was an early investor in our pre-sale.
He had the same unlock schedule as everyone else. Were we happy with the way he sold? Definitely not. But legally, there was nothing we could have done.
And then, just like with Super, they claim they didn't ask for a promotion of the project, but that Mr. Beast decided to comment once himself anyways. On March 9th, 2021, Mr. Beast responds to Eternity Chain saying, Hey. this one will be hype.
It's worth noting, once again, about 24 hours before saying this, this fund wallet purchased over $100,000 of earned tokens in addition to the presale. Now, what is different about Super is that MrBeast's name was put publicly on the Eternity Chain website. On their investors and partners page, you might be asking, well, which is it?
Is he an investor or a partner? And the answer is both. He got into the presale and- And the Yearn team also claims that he partnered with them for an NFT drop.
Supposedly, it was a charity drop and a normal NFT drop. Now, the charity drop specifically did happen in association with one of Mr. Beast's projects, Team Seas, saying, quote, All proceeds will go towards cleaning up the seas around the world. This was early November 2021. Then the official Team Seas account posted on November 3rd, 2021, quote, What an awesome crypto collaboration. in support of the team. Then the CEO of Ethernity Chain, Nick Rose, confirms in Telegram that the drop is supported by Mr. Beast, saying Earn and ETH tokens will be accepted for the charity auction, which was slated to last two months.
Now, the reason I'm sharing all of this is because one month into this two-month charity auction on November 30th, 2021, the Rocket Fund or Beast Fund or whatever you want to call it, start selling huge amounts of this Earn token. Allegedly, they sold over $2 million. while the charity itself was still going on.
Now, I know that sounds horrible. It looks horrible. It is horrible.
Although I have to tell you, personally, I don't think this was a master plan to pump a coin with a charity auction. If it was the plan, it was a bad one because the NFT auction was ultimately a flop. But do I also think it doesn't matter because regardless of your intention selling tokens, within a month of your two-month charity auction is wrong, stupid, and unethical? Yes, yes, I think that as well. Because in case you forgot, Mr. Beast is the charity guy, whose name is on the website.
It isn't a fund. It isn't a crypto rocket fund. It's Mr. Beast's branding. I even asked the earn team about this saying, quote, why did y'all list Mr. Beast instead of rocket fund in your partner's investors? Was that discussed?
They say, quote, we listed him, Mr. Beast, as a partner and quote, yes, they accepted that. So according to the earn team, Mr. Beast knew or should have known that his name was on the line for this investment and partnership. And yet this fund, his fund, whatever you want to call it, sold tokens one month after starting a two month NFT auction for charity. To be fair again, though, it's hard to oversell how bad this NFT auction did. I have found only one NFT.
that appears to have sold here but the bids were made in the earned token which the fund was selling and the actual sale of the nft didn't happen until after the fund sold in november 30th transfer happened in december 23rd so of course i went to mr beast directly to answer this and see if there was some more context they could provide there was no response other than the statement we've already read from mr beast that he did not control the trading although again That isn't a really satisfying answer because we've established Mr. Beast would sometimes direct what to buy and sell to this fund like CryptoPunks. Personally, like I said, I don't think this was a pre-planned scheme, but regardless of intentions. If you're the charity guy, you support a charity, it flops, while your fund makes millions of dollars in profits because it's selling the same earn token people could bid on the charity with, that just is awful. And you should feel awful about it. Um, look, now I want to move on from that to talking about our final token, XCAD.
This is a token you may remember from our investigation into Mr. Beast's business partner, KSI. But unlike KSI, Mr. Beast was not promoting it a lot on Twitter. In fact, the only reason we know Mr. Beast was in the presale is that there were several articles about it bragging about that fact. Once again, Mr. Beast's name was used to promote this.
Instead of the fund itself. And internally to investors, I have to say this built up a lot of excitement, not just because Mr. Beast is a huge name, but because XCAD had what's called creator tokens. So the idea to some investors is that, well, if they're investing, Mr. Beast and KSI, what if they were ever to launch greater tokens?
That would be massive. And I bring this up because some people might ask, like, what do these affiliations, how do they impact people buying these projects? And the answer from what I've seen is. they actually do impact it quite a lot because people are anticipating like further involvement and also the ideas like they must not be investing unless they're long-term holders.
You can see this in the Telegram chat. It became so common that in the XCAD community, one of the admins says, here we go again, another community member asking if there's any possibility of a MrBeast KSI token. And meanwhile, by the way, as that's happening, as the investors are hoping for these greater tokens and that they're imminent, Behind the scenes, something entirely different had been happening. Like with Super and Earn, MrBeast's fund sold a lot of their XCAD early in 2021, rather than holding their tokens. And this was surprising to even the founder of XCAD himself, Oliver Bell, who said they told him they were going to do the opposite.
He tells me, quote, Hey, so MrBeast reached out to me during our pre-sale raise. A group was set up with his team and we had a call with his team and they said they liked the concept. There was no strings attached to the investment. They did, however, want a lot bigger ticket than what I offered them, which I'm glad I did not fulfill.
We discussed not just flipping this token as this can damage projects if people have decent sized tickets. It was my understanding we were aligned on this. However, after listing to which XCAD performed well, there was heavy dumping from a wallet linked to Mr. Beast's team.
I got in contact with them immediately and asked them why they were selling like this. Now, Oliver later claims. This discussion about flipping tokens and then being aligned about the fact they're not going to flip these tokens so quickly was with Jason. And apparently, Oliver was so upset about what happened, he DM'd Jimmy directly, quote, explaining his team will ruin his reputation.
And look, sorry to be a broken record, but yes, I reached out to Jimmy about this too. And once again, there was no reply besides the statement we read earlier. It's worth mentioning.
that I asked Oliver for proof of this message about ruining relationships, and he said the message had been deleted on Telegram. So who you believe here is up to you. Oliver also says, quote, I don't think Jimmy has a bad heart or is a bad person.
I think he has genuine interest in the crypto space, but I think the team that handles his crypto is completely clueless. And here on this last point, I have to disagree with Oliver. I don't think that Jimmy's crypto team is clueless.
I think they saw an opportunity to make millions of dollars with Mr. Beast's valuable brand, and they took it, and they did make millions of dollars. And along the way, they did some things that were shady. Whether or not you think they were also illegal is probably going to be shaped by our unanswered questions and where you fill in those gaps. For example, do you think Mr. Beast knew about the selling that was going on May 12th for the Super Token? Why did he make that tweet?
And then, do you think Mr. Beast knew? about the charity auction and the selling that was happening on November 30th. And do you think Oliver Bell DM'd Mr. Beast and told him his crypto team would ruin his reputation?
And if so, was that ignored? I hate to leave so many unanswered questions here, but I warned you, this was a complicated story. And a big part of the problem is the guy at the center of this story cannot or will not give more than a heavily lawyered statement through a spokesman who's a crisis management consultant.
And let me just say, it's also frustrating that this statement takes zero accountability. Despite the fact Mr. Beast's team knew every major allegation that we're laying out here today, there is no mention of selling while Mr. Beast was tweeting about SuperToken. There's no mention of them selling tokens a month after they partnered with a two-month charity auction. And because of that, this statement feels very hollow.
I think to Mr. Beast and probably to his fund, maybe this is just business. You know, they set out to make a lot of money and they made a lot of money. What's the problem, right? This is America. They might think this is the biggest Mr. Beast nothing burger since Mr. Beast burger.
But look, honestly, I'd agree with them if they had done this crypto stuff without. using Mr. Beast's name, but they want to have their cake and eat it too. This fund trades on Mr. Beast's name. As we've seen, they get in pre-sales based on his name.
He tweets from his public account and they're putting his name publicly on projects websites instead of a fund. But when things go south, suddenly, oh, Mr. Beast, what? No, no liability just because he's not sitting there physically pressing the buttons. I don't think that's the way it works.
Look, I want to close with the final part. of this CryptoPunks podcast we showed you earlier, because in many ways, I think it's a microcosm of this story. Obviously, I have to say, I'm not making any comments or judgments about the guy who's suing me, who's also in this clip.
That's just coincidence. I am only talking about Mr. Beast's reaction because as Mr. Beast is talking about Gary Vee's great CryptoPunks call, there's a moment when the co-host says, hey, maybe instead of Gary Vee being a genius, maybe it's just the call itself that makes the market. And Mr. Beast kind of defends it. He says, no, that was in February. You know, CryptoPunks didn't pop until the summer.
And, you know, I never talked about CryptoPunks until this very moment. Can I ask you guys a question? When Gary does that call with all these billionaires and eight months or a year later, everybody's like, Gary was right again.
Is it possible that he's right because of the call? Do you know what I'm saying? I think about that a lot.
Like, dude, he has all these billionaire market makers in the thing. I think about that a lot. He makes the call, makes the market. By the way, you look around at all the punk owners a year later and you're like, damn, it's all the same mother******. because they were on the call no because bro there's 10 000 punks and there's only like 30 of us in the call we can only own and do so much there's still an entire market that's gonna happen regardless i can tell you i don't think what because that was all back like early february like the things didn't pop off till later and every like nft project was popping off not just plunks i mean i mean make no mistake like having such influential people involved in projects it's not it can't hurt the ability for the project to work.
You know what I'm saying? 95% of those people didn't even mention it. You know what I mean? I've never talked about it publicly. Yeah, but that last part isn't quite true.
The reason we're all here is Mr. Beast tweeted about CryptoPunks the same day he bought them back in February of 2021. That's how we found his wallet. Even though we now know someone else was involved too. And it would apply the same level of scrutiny to many of the investments we've talked about. Was it the genius of Jason Williams, Mr. Beast, or this fund that made them tens of millions of dollars?
Maybe. Or was it the fact that the name they brought to the table was Mr. Beast, one of the most influential and valuable brands in the world. And that's what got them the great deals.
That's what got them a bunch of eyeballs. That's what made it so valuable to have his name on these websites. And maybe that's what made the market.
Ultimately, I think it's for you to decide. So