At the end of 2024, between convening a football shootout against Cristiano Ronaldo and giving 2,000 amputees new prosthetic legs, MrBeast—the world’s biggest YouTuber by quite some margin—took a trip to the Giza Plateau. In a video titled “I Spent 100 Hours Inside The Pyramids!”, the man also known as Jimmy Donaldson stands atop a sand-hued stone staircase and, as usual, starts yelling.
“I somehow,” he throws up his hands, “have unrestricted access,” the camera zooms out to show where he stands, “to all the great pyramids of Egypt.” Cue a wide shot of the entire sandy expanse. Ding, ding, ding, the pyramids light up bright blue on the screen, like capture targets in a video game. Over the next 21 minutes and 42 seconds, viewers are taken on a riotous edit of the five days the MrBeast team spent exploring Egypt’s fabled Fourth Dynasty necropolis.
And they really did. MrBeast submitted a request to the Egypt Film Commission, which granted him access for five days between 5 and 10 December. The local production company Hama Productions provided audiovisual support. On-screen archaeological guidance, meanwhile, came through Ramy Romany, the Los Angeles-based Egyptian film director and host of the Discovery Channel’s Mummies Unwrapped, alongside the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former minister of tourism and antiquities.
The video frames this unfettered access as exceptional. But, Hawass says, everyone can apply—“you can apply tomorrow!”—and, for a fee, you will get in.
Hour one sees Donaldson in a corridor tapping a wall: “Someone, 45 hundred years ago, put this rock right here.” “Correct,” comes Romany’s reply. The voiceover explains that they are in “a passageway that Egyptologists say leads to King Khufu’s tomb”.
The team goes on to play at excavating skeletons in the workmen’s tombs (built for the pyramids’ builders). Donaldson climbs under the Sphinx to bury a handwritten note along with a $10,000 solid-gold Swarm from his collectible tiny toy range.
By day four, they have unlocked the Tomb of Iymery, normally out of bounds to pretty much everybody because of the extraordinary polychromatic murals depicting ancient Egyptian daily life that still cover the walls. Romany points out a section that helped scholars understand how wine was produced at the time, which Donaldson immediately likens to a how-to YouTube video.
Hour 99 sees the crew follow Hawass up through the stacked chambers at the heart of the Great Pyramid, to finally reach the highest point. Hawass translates some hieroglyphic graffiti showing that a “gang” of “friends” of Khufu were here. They were some of the builders, he says. It is hard not to draw a parallel with the group of goofy Beast boys he is talking to.
Donaldson ends the video saying he has no idea “why Egypt let us do all the things that we did, but I’m eternally grateful”. This feels a bit rich. In the month MrBeast has been on The Art Newspaper's radar, his audience has grown by 14 million subscribers, from 369 million to 383 million. He knows exactly what he is doing; he has the science of co-opting social media algorithms down to the absolute millisecond.
Hawass says he agreed to take part because it was a great way to communicate about the origins of the pyramids. “I’m an Egyptologist who is good at communicating with the public. I’ve done hundreds of TV shows. But with Jimmy it was a different experience, because he’s fun and he’s a nice man. I really wanted to use him to send the message to younger people, because many believe that pyramids were built by aliens. Jimmy has [almost] 400 million followers. Through him, I could give this message that the pyramids are built by Egyptians. Also, he did good publicity for tourism.”
This matters hugely in Egypt, particularly ahead of the long-awaited opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in July. Despite ongoing regional conflicts and trade disruptions in the Red Sea, forecasters predict a slightly less anaemic 4% economic growth for 2025 than 2023/24’s 2.8% (it was 3.5% for Q1 of 24/25), but they also say inflation is set to remain high, at 20.4%. Tourism has nonetheless, as Ivanna Vladkova Hollar, the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief for Egypt, put it in March, “remained robust” throughout last year.
Tourism revenue is important for the local economy. It is also crucial to the preservation of all these antiquities, Hawass says: “Without tourism, we will not be able to restore and excavate the monuments. We depend entirely on ticket sales.”
A new audience
The social scientist Rhodri Davies, who has researched Donaldson’s increasingly extravagant forays into philanthropy—building 100 homes in Latin America, and 100 wells across Africa, and funding cataract surgery for 1,000 people—draws a parallel between the Egyptian government inviting him over and non-profits looking to partner with him: “You get access not only to a large audience, but potentially a very different one to the one you would normally be able to tap into,” Davies says.
In the comments on the video, many Egyptian followers thank Donaldson, in Arabic, for showing them things they have never seen themselves, or for telling the world what makes their country so special. There are many comments on how “cool” and “awesome” and “funny” and “warm” the “Egyptian dudes”—Romany and Hawass—are. And they have a point. The whole thing is a masterclass in public relations. The bombast of the video is a smokescreen. “Since we were around,” Hawass says, “no damage was done at all. Everything was really carefully done, with respect.”
For archaeological digs, you need the relevant permits from the ministry of tourism and antiquities. But in the 30 years of his career, Roland Enmarch, a reader in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, has been inside all the great pyramids, multiple times, like any ordinary tourist might. He points out that not only are quite a few of the Giza sites open to the public, “there’s actually a vast amount of archaeology spreading over quite a large area”. Fencing much of it off would be impracticable.
Centuries of access
What the video also successfully conveys is that foreigners have been accessing these spaces for centuries, in far more irreverent ways. The camera repeatedly lands on inscriptions like “Scoperia da G. Belzoni. 2. Mar. 1818”, boldly written on the wall of Khafre’s burial chamber, or, in an upper chamber in the Great Pyramid, on “Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber, 1837”, stamped in great big serif capitals. “It was very common, even into the early 20th century, for Westerners to leave their notes like this,” Enmarch says. “It’s only very gradually that this practice has become socially unacceptable. Every so often you still get a tourist who’s arrested for carving their name into an ancient monument.” He points out the “nice contrast” in Donaldson leaving a gold toy behind: “It’s rather less damaging to leave an object that’s inert than to actually scribble on the walls.” Hawass was worried fans might come digging but, it turns out, MrBeast’s entourage took the gold toy back.
The Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, who features in the video, says that MrBeast is playing an important role in debunking the myth that the pyramids were built by aliens
Photo: Danita Delimont/Alamy Stock Photo
More important to him, and to the other Egyptologists interviewed, is the way the video successfully debunks nonsensical narratives in 20 lightning minutes. “Egyptology and ancient Egypt are such pop-cultural staples in all sorts of bowdlerised and somewhat weird ways,” Enmarch says, “that Egyptologists get inured to slightly strange takes. Compared with a lot of the things that we have to put up with in the public sphere, this video was actually fairly straightforward: it’s a good presentation of primary evidence, in other words, the physical remains.”
And that is exactly the goal. As Hawass puts it, “my answers to Jimmy, as a young man, were always very simple. I need people to understand what I’m really talking about. It just makes me very happy when I see that my knowledge doesn’t go to scholars only, but it goes to the public.”
MrBeast, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities did not respond to requests for comment.
- MrBeast's YouTube video I Spent 100 Hours Inside The Pyramids!
