Fallacy of consequentialism. Yes, tons of people got free cataract surgery but that's a band-aid solution to cataract surgery being artificially locked behind a paywall all those people were unable to bypass, and the paywall still exists and is still preventing multiple factors of that group from accessing the same surgery. And wells in the developing world has been a charity money sink for decades at this point, instead of asking "well where's the well you're going to build" why don't you ask "why do so many people all across the world lack clean water?"

And the answer to that question is that it's not profitable to provide clean drinking water to people who can't pay for it. Not that it's not possible, not that it's not a solved engineering problem, clearly it is because some fuckin YouTuber pony's up the cash and suddenly there's a goddamn well. The only reason it's not already there is because we decided someone has to pay for the problem to be solved, and if none of the people who need it solved can afford it, we let them continue drinking dirty water and die from preventable illness because they were born in the wrong income bracket.

And by the same logic, why does Mr. Beast have this money in the first place? Because he's making bullshit videos about """solving""" these problems, because presenting loud, stupid nonsense to a western audience, for free, so they can be showed video ads in the midst of it, is worth enough to pay for these fucking wells.

To make this completely fucking clear: the attention of a western, young audience who's parents have money to spend and may, MIGHT, influence them to buy a product, is worth more than providing clean fucking drinking water to entire villages of people who live in a non-western place, with enough leftover for Mr. Beast to draw a frankly unethical salary for what he's actually doing, and providing to the world. That level of inequity between two groups of people is the grand fucking canyon.

And, to make this other point extra clear, that's not Mr. Beast's fault. He's acting completely rationally within a system that has utterly lost the plot in terms of what actually has value. The fact that unhinged amounts of money are going to a frankly, by all accounts I can find, quite amoral man who has cracked the code for generating loud, obnoxious nonsense that children will consume on an industrial scale so equally morally bankrupt companies can shove advertisements down their eyeballs and convince them to buy shit they don't need, so much so that he can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make yet more loud, obnoxious bullshit, is the problem. All of this is so completely and thoroughly disentangled from any notion of what anyone actually needs, and the fact that tons of people on this board and elsewhere still manage to call this system the most rational economic system yet discovered while looking at this complete fucking nonsense is astonishing to me.