No, because a normal and healthy adult does not have an interest in creating content for and engaging with kids for hours and hours on end (unless it's your own family, and even then rarely will any adult but the parents and grandparents have more than a passing interest in a child). Because we have nothing in common. These "celebrities" and "influencers" spin their entire lives around kids. if you are an adult that is not normal.
Disagree. There are plenty of people (entertainers, teachers, doctors, whatever) who are good and genuine people who spend their lives around children. Don't dare suggest Mister Rogers, Captain Kangaroo, or Burl Ives were anything but t&h, as far as kids go.
The problem is one of opportunity. Kids are exploitable, and exploiters gravitate to easy exploitation opportunities. Same reason a money-motivated opportunist/ exploiter would gravitate more to sales than to coal- mining. That doesn't mean everyone in sales is a conman, and it doesn't mean everyone who works with kids or enjoys kids is a creepy perv looking to groom. What it does mean is that you need to be excessively vigilant to prevent the worst, and even the bad.
...but let's assume MrBeast is not, himself, interested in children in any sexual way, and even that he believes he profits ethically, or has aimed to do so.
He should have known intuitively - or at the very least, the minute he hired his first corporate lawyer - that he needs to vet every single person involved very heavily, and have a hard conduct line that equals firing and equity forfeiture or buyback if there's anything edgy or weird with anyone underage. There should not have been kid mods. There should have been strict rules about even closed discord channel chatting - including NO minor-adult chatting, except for any formal q&a, no employee-mod sex talk or flirting or image-sharing (FFS). He should have ensured that those things literally could not happen by having external people control access/admin. There should have been at least periodic sampling and monitoring of any chat involving kids, and disciplinary action for any of this garbage. In short, he needed to at LEAST treat his business like a business and set rules.
Any kid now saying they felt uncomfortable or exploited by Chris or anyone else when they were 12 is someone who sure as hell can at least bring an action against the company. And without looking deeply into it, I sure wouldn't want to be on the defense end of explaining why I put
zero in place to protect minor children in MY discord from MY employees who were discussing inappropriate topics, sharing porn images (and maybe worse), and propositioning them (even as "joking around"). Especially when it turns out in a very short time that someone doing a lot of it turns out to have some grooming accusations, keeps cartoon art of sexualized children, meets up alone with children, and has for the last year been slinking and slobbering all over the internet about sex - and spending time with other sex-obsessed very young men, at least one of which is a sex worker making bank being publicly feminized by an older man. He did not take reasonable precautions to protect those kids.
Chris was separated from his wife back in 2022. There is no way that his dearest friend did not know what that was about or the kinds of things Chris is into. And the poster, etc., suggests Chris felt no obligation to be discrete; the opposite, in fact. But you can't single out an employee for rules and monitoring because you hate or draw conclusions from their private life, or because they're making a personal lifestyle change. That gets you into discrimination territory. WHICH IS WHY YOU HAVE NEUTRAL, SOUND, AND PRUDENT RULES AND REVIEWS IN PLACE FOR EVERYONE BEFORE YOU CREATE OR NEGLIGENTLY OVERLOOK OR IGNORE A CULTURE OF CONSTANT SEXUAL BANTER BETWEEN GROWN MEN AND THE KIDS WHO IDOLIZE THEM.
And when your employees are your buddies, you give HR and Legal the berth they need to protect you from your own biased or poor judgment.