On a balmy Sunday morning in East Rutherford, New Jersey, a miracle occurs: a shopping center is completely full. Thousands of men, women and children have turned out for the grand opening of MrBeast Burger restaurant and are now clogging the arteries of the Galleria, eager to see a man say he wants to change the world. The 3 million square foot area welcomes them into the space, allowing kids and teens to throw themselves at barricades amidst the massive indoor attractions, including Legoland, roller coasters, a water park, and a year-round ski slope. This isn’t just a mall, and it’s not just a restaurant opening: this is a collaboration between one of the country’s biggest retail spaces and a massive internet star – and it brings out the worst in everyone.
Last week, just days before the opening, MrBeast announced the launch on his Twitter account and Youtube channel. “I’ll be working at the restaurant all day first day and if you stop by you might see me,” he tweeted in a message to his 15.3 million followers.
“I didn’t think it would be like this,” a security guard told Rolling Stone. What started as 3,000 fans lining up early Saturday morning has now swelled to at least 10,000 corpses filling the sidewalks and completely blocking the few open storefronts. “That better be a good burger.”
With over 100 million subscribers on its main channel alone, MrBeast is famous for its videos with huge cash prizes that rely on volunteers willing to take part in grueling competitions for a chance at life-changing cash prizes. (He has a strong charitable side, which is best expressed in the videos for Beast Philanthropy, a nonprofit and charitable channel that focuses on gifts for those in need, such as Ukrainian refugees or underfunded American schools.) Seek video posted Saturday , released the day before the event, he gives 100 of his subscribers $10,000 each and then spends a night chasing them at the mall. The 23 who hide until morning get to keep their prizes. A mother bursts into tears after winning. “My kids are going to have a real vacation,” she says.
On Sunday the scene is radically different: people everywhere. There are parents and grandparents and older siblings and dogs and mall workers and people celebrating their twenty-first birthdays and mingling with sleeping teenagers and toddlers desperately trying to throw themselves out of plastic strollers with built-in tablets. Lines large and small run almost every inch of the eastern part of the mall, making it impossible to tell where anything begins or ends.
CT Jones for Rolling Stone
It’s constant, utter chaos. The energy varies greatly between stagnation and pure adrenaline. People must have an official yellow wristband to join the line that ends at the burger shop front, but an influx of new patrons has infiltrated those who stayed the night. People run to stop others from cutting them in line, no one knows what’s going on. (I’m not immune to the disruption: there’s a MrBeast Burger logo on my media pass, and I’m constantly being approached and stalked by kids and parents asking me to take their photos or wondering if I’m the person who lets them skip the queue and meet their hero.)
The restaurant itself is said to elicit from its YouTube channel. A glass container in the storefront wall displays thousands of crumpled bills, while the rest of the arrangement highlights props and clips from his biggest videos. In a hallway lined with white brick, clerks write the names of everyone ordering a burger on ladders. But very few people speaking to Rolling Stone seemed to be focused on the burger. Instead, most are obsessed with MrBeast’s connection to money – and many came with signs asking for cash or asking to enter one of his contests. People in the crowd babble on the possibility that the entire event could be another giveaway stunt for his channel. Her excitement at meeting her hero seems totally entangled in the possibility that meeting could change her life.
Parents hold their children up when cameras appear, or encourage children to hold hand-made signs higher above the crowd. “Let her take a picture of your zodiac sign, baby,” says one mother, encouraging her son to remove his mask so the camera can see his face. A child is sitting on the floor next to a sign that reads “MrBeast is the American Dream.”
Next to one of the lines, teenagers are screaming and arguing over encircled patches of grass scattered throughout the mall. They appear to be for some sort of competition, matching a large red circle placed on a stage, one of several in the center of the mall. Even after being told by people with lanyards that officials wouldn’t select competitors that way, people refuse to give up their jobs.
A boy named Damon tells Rolling Stone that he’s willing to take any money MrBeast offers. “What have I got to lose?” he says. After another boy informs him that others have been kicked out of the lawn circles. “If I tell them I’m competing for a food bank, they might take a closer look,” he says. Later in the day, there is a competition on the main stage in which the circles and at least 10 volunteers participate. Damon is nowhere to be seen from the balcony.
CT Jones for Rolling Stone
According to social media and fans, MrBeast has been at the mall since at least 8am Sunday morning. He’s on the move in the burger section, but the fans are moving so fast, following his path in disbelief as if he might disappear at any moment. He has said he will take a photo with anyone who buys a burger, but is constantly being pulled away from the line and replaced with one of his Beast brothers, to the horror of the waiting crowd. Even when he’s there, he keeps taking breaks and disappearing into the maze of the mall’s back corridors, the smile fading from his face as the cameras rotate.
A budding youtuber wearing a dress made from MrBeast candy bar wrappers is frustrated that his team doesn’t seem to take her request to meet him seriously. A girl waits on the side to shoot a video of MrBeast opening her gender reveal card. At some point during the day, he does a TikTok with the corn boy, who was helpful enough to bring his own corn on the cob. The man is physically surrounded by both fans and his own team, who have a few dozen cameras trained on him. Waiting fans who have completely exited the queue now camp out in droves at most barricaded entrances and exits, shouting his name at the glimpse of his face.
He looks overwhelmed. MrBeast posted a video on Twitter waving at the crowd.
“I literally work in my studio all day and hardly ever leave it, so it’s overwhelming to see something like this,” he writes.
A young girl bursts past two security guards and rams right into the arms of MrBeast who, although looking a little startled, tries to hug back and force a smile before someone pulls her away. His eyes are wide. she is sobbing.
Earlier this year, MrBeast told Rolling Stone that he and his team are working on building a Tyler Perry-esque production center in his hometown of North Carolina, likely for aspiring content creators who need the space to do MrBeast-level stunts and antics. He balked at the idea that his videos encourage young children to focus on money, saying his only desire is to inspire his young fans to do good and popularize unconditional giving. Social media is all about his self-proclaimed goal of making the world a better place.
But walking through the crowded mall – seeing kids desperately trying to even get close to MrBeast and his team, burgers being thrown away when he’s spotted, the sheer volume of TikToks and vlogs, and the Youtube streams that filmed, and the six-year-olds going wild for an amount of money they can’t even count – it’s easy to wonder: Is this the better world of MrBeast?