The rumored friendship between Elon Musk and MrBeast has seemingly extended to some sort of business partnership, at least according to some who have seen the same MrBeast tweet myriad times on the app this week.
The tweet is a full MrBeast video, 16 minutes long, showing the influential YouTuber driving a wide range of cars with increasing prices and has already racked up over 122 million views.
$1 Car vs $100,000,000 Car!!!
I’m curious how much ad revenue a video on X would make so I’m reuploading this to test it. Will share ad rev next week ❤️ pic.twitter.com/amSSmddFht— MrBeast (@MrBeast) January 15, 2024
According to users who did a little digging on the post, some are speculating it looks like the video is an undisclosed ad, which is potentially illegal. The users who interacted with the post found that clicking on it gives them the option to select that they're "not interested in this ad," despite the post not being labeled an advertisement.
According to Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day, there is indeed something fishy about MrBeast's post, but Twitter has an explanation about why it's being promoted like an ad, though technically it is not an ad itself.
A Twitter / X employee told Broderick that the video has a pre-roll advertisement from Shopify, and when a post has a pre-roll ad, it is promoted like an ad but without a label. MrBeast's post is technically not an ad, so it doesn't require the label.
In a December exchange, MrBeast told Musk that while he was interested in experimenting with releasing videos on Twitter, the revenue he would generate by releasing them on the platform as opposed to YouTube wouldn't be enough to cover the costs of creating his content.
Something, however, appears to have convinced MrBeast to give uploading to Twitter / X a whirl, as he noted in his original post, "I’m curious how much ad revenue a video on X would make so I’m reuploading this to test it. Will share ad rev next week."
The heads of Twitter appear to be thrilled about this, as Elon Musk himself directly promoted the video, as did Linda Yaccarino.