It's not cynical, it's fairly neutral. It doesn't mean he's a bad person. There are worse things he could do with his money and at the end of the day, he's doing a lot of good.
But it's not altruism, it's philanthropy. It's more about the performance than the act itself. Some of his videos literally reycle game show ideas ("do X contrived thing successfully and you get $Y money"). His antics help people and that's a good thing. But he's also making them jump through hoops (not literally AFAIK, though I wouldn't be surprised) and perform gratitude for his audience. Things can be good and bad at the same time.
Consider the American trope of "feel good" news reports about, say, an elementary school kid doing a successful fundraiser to pay off his classmate's school lunch debt. Yes, it's amazing that an elementary school student did that but it's also horrifying that this means school lunch debt is just a thing society has come to accept as normal and that society is so dysfunctional a literal child had to take the initiative instead of just getting to be a child.
I think Mr Beast is one of the better people when it comes to using their ridiculous wealth and social capital for good, but it's horrifying that people have to perform misery for an online audience to get relatively cheap medical treatments and frankly it's horrifying that a single person can have access to and control over such an amount of wealth that they can perform this kind of stunts on the regular while at the same time so many people are so desperately poor that their lives can be changed by being gifted mere crumbs in comparison. Mr Beast may be a relatively good person but that he (i.e. his channel/brand) can exist at all should be deeply concerning.
But it's not altruism, it's philanthropy. It's more about the performance than the act itself. Some of his videos literally reycle game show ideas ("do X contrived thing successfully and you get $Y money"). His antics help people and that's a good thing. But he's also making them jump through hoops (not literally AFAIK, though I wouldn't be surprised) and perform gratitude for his audience. Things can be good and bad at the same time.
Consider the American trope of "feel good" news reports about, say, an elementary school kid doing a successful fundraiser to pay off his classmate's school lunch debt. Yes, it's amazing that an elementary school student did that but it's also horrifying that this means school lunch debt is just a thing society has come to accept as normal and that society is so dysfunctional a literal child had to take the initiative instead of just getting to be a child.
I think Mr Beast is one of the better people when it comes to using their ridiculous wealth and social capital for good, but it's horrifying that people have to perform misery for an online audience to get relatively cheap medical treatments and frankly it's horrifying that a single person can have access to and control over such an amount of wealth that they can perform this kind of stunts on the regular while at the same time so many people are so desperately poor that their lives can be changed by being gifted mere crumbs in comparison. Mr Beast may be a relatively good person but that he (i.e. his channel/brand) can exist at all should be deeply concerning.