Beast GamesWinner Made History with $10 Million Prize. How He's Using the Money to Help with His Son's Rare Disease (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Jeffrey Allen; Jack and Lucas.Photo:Courtesy of Prime Video; Courtesy of Corrine Combs

Courtesy of Prime Video; Courtesy of Corrine Combs

Before applying to the show, Jeffrey Allen started watchingMrBeastYouTube videos with his son, Jack. The 9-year-old introduced his father to the videos that have already attracted 367 million subscribers on YouTube. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has been pulling viewers into his channel for years with titles that tease reality show-like experiences and large sums of prize money.

Courtesy of Prime Video

And huge it was. At the start of the competition, 2,000 competitors flocked to Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas to compete on the reality show, with only half of these competitors making it to the official Prime Video show.

“I applied for it, but I didn’t really tell anybody until I knew I got in,” Allen continues. “So it was a secret I kept…  I don’t wanna get anybody’s hopes up and I don’t want my wife to start planning what life’s gonna be like with me gone for a handful of weeks. So I waited until I actually got in before I told them.”

Despite the lawsuit, Allen claims he didn’t share that same experience, stating, “My experience with MrBeast, the Beast team and then Amazon were second to none.”

“The way I look at it is if you’re gonna go out and compete for $5 million, it’s not gonna be easy. But the conditions were more than adequate for me and my friends,” Allen continues. “Honestly, I didn’t know what’s real and what’s not… I didn’t give a ton of a ton of thought to it, but I was just hoping that it didn’t honestly hurt MrBeast or Amazon or the production because I had such a great time.”

As a father of two sons, Allen had much more than the prize money on his mind when he decided to apply. Though he knew competing on the show would be an opportunity to let Jack “see his dad do something super cool,” he also applied hoping to use the experience as an opportunity to raise awareness for his younger son’s rare disease.

Allen’s youngest son Lucas, 7, was diagnosed with Creatine Transporter Deficiency at just 2 years old. CTD is described as “inborn errors of creatine metabolism which interrupt the formation or transport of creatine,” according to theNational Organization for Rare Disorders.

“He was missing milestones, especially compared to his older brother,” Allen says of his son’s diagnosis. “He wasn’t able to sit up the same way his older brother was. He wasn’t able to crawl as fluidly and even the way he would eat was different.”

Allen describes the period before they knew what was wrong as an “18-month diagnosis odyssey.”

Jack and Lucas.Courtesy of Corrine Combs

Courtesy of Corrine Combs

“We strapped him up to dozens of machines, did a bunch of tests, and until almost a year and a half later, we were coming up short. There was no answers. No specialists knew what was going on, and we finally got diagnosed through an MRS,” Allen recounts.

Unfortunately, as CTD is particularly rare, there is currently no official treatment or cure for Lucas’ condition. “Our pediatrician had no clue. The specialist had no clue. And even once we were diagnosed, the geneticist to serve us from a premier academic institution had never seen a patient with his condition,” Allen says.

“[Donaldson] wheeled out another pyramid of $5 million and says, ‘If you want, someone can grab this coin and flip a coin. And if you call it right, everybody will compete for 10 million. If you don’t, you’re eliminated and you get to compete for 5 million,’“ Allen recalls. “My friend Gage — number 974 who’s an absolute, amazing man — grabbed that coin, flipped it, called it right and we all competed for $10 million.”

For Allen, the “ultimate goal” was to take home the prize money to help his son. “I need to take care of him," he says. “I want to make sure he’s taken care of at home, but also, can we invest into research to help ultimately find a treatment for him and other kids like him?”

Lucas and Jack.Courtesy of Corrine Combs

Allen is a volunteer board member of theAssociation for Creatine Deficiencies, a parent-led organization aimed at finding and supporting research to help those with CTD and two other cerebral creatine deficiency syndromes. He says this is the “primary funder” for such research, and with the prize money officially in his hands, his next goal is to find projects to put the winnings toward, while also making sure measures are put in place to take care of Lucas.

“My goal is to help my son, and that means, how do I make sure that he’s taken care of in case mom and dad pass away? ‘Cause right now he’d have to live with us forever. How do I make sure that his brother doesn’t have to care for him as he ages?” Allen explains. “We look at how do we care for Lucas at home? And then how do we care for other Lucases around the world?”

“The last thing we want to do is put the burden on an association that doesn’t have the projects to fund,” he continues. “So our job is to help source these projects, whether they’re academic or whether they’re private. We want to invest into treatments that are gonna help Lucas and help kids like Lucas.”

“It’s one thing to experience it and you think you remember how it went. But it’s a whole other thing to watch the show and see other people’s perspective,” he explains. “It was so fun to watch with my son Jack… He taught me everything about MrBeast and all of his videos.”

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Jas Davis/Prime

“Winning $10 million is gonna help Lucas and kids like Lucas tremendously. And to actually fund a treatment, you need tens of millions of dollars. So I’m not gonna be able to do it alone. We need a ton of support, but it’s a great start,” Allen says.

source: people.com