Imagine that you become an overnight successful YouTuber, and you receive thousands of potential contracts. Among all of them, you decide to sign and accept one that promises to release burgers with your name and open a franchise that will make money to bury several people. All good? Now imagine that the monkey’s paw curls a finger: the burgers become a hit, but they are terrible… and on top of that, their actual creators sue you.
Mr Beast
To summarize the story so far: MrBeast, one of the world’s most followed (and wealthy) YouTubers, teamed up with a company called Virtual Dining Concepts to launch various burger establishments worldwide under the name MrBeast Burgers. The issue arose when the food turned out to be awful (if not inedible), prompting the YouTuber to sue the company, seeking to terminate the contract due to their disregard for product quality.
The plot took a new twist when Virtual Dining Concepts responded, suggesting that fame doesn’t grant the ability to break contracts. The burger locations have thrived across America for two and a half years, and just one week after the initial lawsuit, the company launched a countersuit, alleging that MrBeast had exploited them and leveraged his fame to secure a more favorable deal.
In one of the tweets included in the lawsuit (because we are in that period of the story), MrBeast stated, “If I had the chance to shut it down, I would have done it a long time ago. Sometimes when you’re young, you sign shitty deals,” thereby disrespecting and insulting their quality while they still had an ongoing agreement. Furthermore, an agreement that was set to last until 2024, but MrBeast unilaterally extended indefinitely in 2022. It doesn’t sound good, truth be told.
MrBeast Burgers contends that MrBeast’s tweets, along with his team taking control of the restaurant’s social media accounts, have damaged the company’s reputation, resulted in the loss of customers, and in general, caused them a financial loss in the nine-figure range. That’s a minimum of $100 million, which is the kind of money you might withdraw from an ATM to buy some bread. By the way, without examining the contract, it’s impossible to determine who is in the right. Maybe both parties have valid points. Maybe neither of them. What’s clear for now is that we’ll be avoiding these burgers, just to be safe. You never know.
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