I suppose since friendship is difficult to define, it can probably be restated to "has had a 1:1 conversation with" or something similar.
Those paths connects me to almost every world leader from the 1980's onwards.
What you'll quickly find is that some people have 1:1 conversations with a lot of people, and relatively "unimportant" politicians in particular do so both with "regular people" and all the other parliamentary members including the "important" ones, and there are many nexuses like that where once you find a connection to one it's a massive shortcut for a surprising proportion of the world.
As a relatively small YouTuber (50K subs), I have never really spoken to giant YouTubers with millions of subscribers.
But I have spoken to many medium sized YouTubers (100K-1M subs), who are speaking to those giant YouTubers as well as to me.
I don't know MrBeast, but I know a guy who has personally worked with him on videos.
One person can speak to a lot of imporant people throughout their career. You just have to meet them.
> Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also known as the six handshakes rule.[1]
I know it doesn't mean we're all 'blood brothers' but it's useful when discussing the 'small world' phenomenon.