Have you ever competed for the chance to win a $2 million private island from MrBeast, one of YouTube's biggest creators? Well, one Penn student has — College sophomore Kimi Li.
Li was enjoying her summer break at home when she received a phone call in June from an unknown North Carolina number. Answering the call, Li quickly realized that she was talking to the management of MrBeast, the YouTube channel created by Jimmy Donaldson — commonly referred to as “MrBeast” himself. The channel, which organizes expensive stunts and gives millions of dollars away to strangers, invited Li and 99 other randomly chosen individuals to compete in Donaldson’s recent video: “I Gave My 100,000,000th Subscriber An Island.”
“Initially I thought it was a scam call, but that day I particularly wanted to entertain a scam caller,” Li told The Daily Pennsylvanian. “I picked up and there was this girl who said, ‘Hi, we’re with the MrBeast company and we saw that you are a subscriber’ — she said they wanted to set up an interview to see if I would be good for casting.”
After a few rounds of interviews and meetings with the head of casting, Li was told to wait to hear back for her callback status, which according to the caster could be announced “next week or in two years’ as details were unclear.
One month later, Li was notified through an email titled “100 M Island” that she was chosen for an upcoming MrBeast video that would fly her out to the Bahamas. Li received her travel information just hours before the flight, making the whole experience feel very “last-minute.”
“[MrBeast’s team] gave me my flight information the night before and my flight was in the morning so there was not even a 24-hour difference,” Li told the DP. “The whole experience of waiting on their emails and their confirmation, it was very much a trust the process moment.”
While the MrBeast video is just 15 minutes long, Li was actually in the Bahamas for five days from July 16 to 20. Even after arriving, Li and the rest of the contestants had no idea what challenges awaited them.
“Whenever MrBeast explained the challenges, it was always like five minutes beforehand. We had no idea what was going to happen before then,” Li said.
The first challenge consisted of creating a fire, and given the Bahamas’ tropical environment, Li actually learned how to build a fire at home while training for the competition. In the video, MrBeast says that building a fire takes on average 20 minutes — Li, however, recalled how the challenge took much longer than that.
“It took over three hours for that whole challenge to be done. We were there from midday to sunset,” Li said. “Making a fire is harder than it looks, especially because we literally just had two rocks and no fire starter.”
One of the fifty individuals who made it through the first challenge, Li faced the next challenge — a replica of the “Red Light, Green Light” game from the Netflix show "Squid Game," set on a cargo ship in the Atlantic Ocean. To survive the challenge, each participant needed to get to the opposite side of the ship, while also freezing in place whenever MrBeast said "red light."
“There was one moment in the video where Jimmy said he would put down the mic for 10 minutes and leave us standing still because there was no time limit, which actually happened in real life,” Li said. Li and other contestants had to stand in place without moving for minutes on end. “I really had to bring out my inner LEGO character during the "Squid Game" challenge because every time I paused at the red light, my hands were positioned like a LEGO character.”
After Li successfully completed the "Squid Game" challenge, only 20 contestants remained. The next challenge consisted of a random elimination that dwindled the size to 10, which Li survived and noted was “pure luck.”
“It didn’t make it into the video, but on the cargo ship with the top ten, Jimmy yelled ‘lower the docks’ and a big barge door just opened and we could see the private island from there,” Li said. “Seeing the island as the sun was hitting it made me think like, ‘Wow, I’m really in a MrBeast video trying to win an island which is an insane thing to fathom.’”
Yet, only five contestants would actually step foot on the private island, as the other five would leave in the following challenge.
MrBeast took Li and the remaining contestants on a pirate ship where 10 planks were laid out with an attached rope. Only five of the planks would remain up after the rope had been cut, leaving five unlucky contestants to plunge into the ocean. Li was the fourth contestant to go, with already three of the five sturdy planks taken.
“Out of all of the challenges, this was the most nerve-wracking because the statistical probability of four people in a row out of ten being safe was, I actually did the math, less than a 2% chance,” Li said. “But when that rope was cut and I didn’t fall into the ocean, I was very relieved.”
Li and the other four remaining contestants were then escorted to the private island where the final challenge was: a scavenger hunt to find MrBeast’s 100 million subscriber YouTube Play Button, awarded to him for passing the subscriber milestone.
Before that began, MrBeast offered a proposition to give the contestants $50,000 to walk away from the final challenge, which no one took. In her explanation in the video, Li told Jimmy that “$50,000 couldn’t even pay a year’s worth of tuition” to which he replied, “that’s sad.”
“I don’t regret not taking the 50K because if I had just taken it, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to explore the island. I think I would have beaten myself up over not competing for the potential of winning a $2 million island,” Li said.
The hunt to follow lasted several hours, according to the video. Li did not find the Play Button first and therefore did not win the island, but she still left the experience with lots of memories and lessons.
“I don’t think I would have traded this experience for anything else. The whole experience has taught me to have faith in the process, wait things out and see where your luck takes you — and to obviously answer scam phone calls,” Li said.
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