Exclusive: MrBeast launches 'Million Dollar Puzzle' with Super Bowl ad
Daniel de ViséEditor's note: Rate the best and worst 2026 Super Bowl commercials with USA Today's Ad Meter.
A kinetic Super Bowl ad starring the YouTube personality MrBeast will launch someone on the path to solving a complex puzzle game and winning a million dollars.
The ad, unveiled during the Feb. 8 game, starts with Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson announcing he has put $1 million inside a vault, to be claimed by whomever is first to solve a series of puzzles, with potential clues flashing onscreen throughout the half-minute spot.
It’s a high-energy pitch for Slackbot, an AI assistant built into the Slack communication platform.
This is the first Super Bowl ad for Donaldson, 27, the proverbial beast of YouTube, with more subscribers than anyone else on the social media platform.
Super Bowl ad started as post from MrBeast
The ad began as a Dec. 29 post from Donaldson, saying he was "sitting on an amazing Super Bowl commercial idea." Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce, responded.
"I’ve always wanted to make a Super Bowl commercial and was psyched to hear that Marc and the Salesforce team were looking to do something groundbreaking," Donaldson told USA TODAY. "They really trusted us, and I can’t wait to watch people race to solve it. We all use Slack at Beast Industries, so it was pretty cool to work with their team and make sure they had an epic spot for the big game."
In a sense, Slackbot became a third collaborator: Teams at Salesforce and Beast Industries credited the AI with speeding production on the spot. A Super Bowl ad, they said, seldom comes together so quickly.
"We saw firsthand the power of AI in action as Slack helped us collaborate with MrBeast in 27 days instead of six months," Benioff told USA TODAY. "Slackbot became our teammate, a coworker with agentic superpowers to instantly find any information needed and turn it into action."
With 466 million YouTube subscribers on his main channel, MrBeast should need no introduction. Still, a Super Bowl spot is a rite of passage in American celebrity. The ad should raise Donaldson’s currency among those who haven’t seen his videos or streamed his Amazon Prime reality series, "Beast Games."
The campaign posits Donaldson as the Gen Z face of Salesforce, the customer relationship management company responsible for Slack.
With the ad, Donaldson launches a treasure hunt-style contest that is expected to stretch for weeks. The brief spot abounds in potential clues: a spider, a sine wave, a bird on a wire, an elephant and the math symbol for 10 to the power of 5, among other Easter eggs.
Who will win the Million Dollar Puzzle?
After dissecting the ad, viewers are directed to a dedicated MrBeast page on the Salesforce website, to register and continue hunting for clues.
According to the official puzzle FAQ, the contest will entail solving a series of "real, nonlinear, and interconnected puzzles that are designed to reward creativity, logic, and persistence."
The ad is tailored to showcase Slackbot. The AI is designed to help Slack users sift through their work product, search old messages and track down company information, among other uses.
Clues to the Million Dollar Puzzle could pop up anywhere, according to the puzzle masters: In the ad, on social media, even in Donaldson’s Feb. 6 appearance with Jimmy Fallon on "The Tonight Show."
MrBeast's viral videos blend capitalism and charity
Using a Super Bowl ad to launch a million-dollar contest is old hat to Donaldson, who has leveraged an uncanny ability to spawn viral videos.
His stunts pivot between themes of capitalism and charity, often with large sums of money changing hands. In one video, he’s challenging contestants to spend 100 days in an underground bunker for $500,000. In another, he’s paying for 1,000 people to undergo cataract surgery.
In "Beast Games," 1,000 contestants vie for a $5 million prize. It is the most-watched "unscripted" series in Prime Video history.