Featured image source: Fidias / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Most Super Bowl ads ask you to remember a brand for about four seconds. The one MrBeast made with Salesforce asked you to notice that the stitching on his belt was an electrician’s wiring notation.
That is not a joke. The 30-second spot that aired during Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026 contained a treasure hunt built by Lone Shark Games, with a million dollars sitting at the end of it. Roughly 268,000 people registered to try. The full solution has now been laid out publicly, and going through it is a genuinely strange experience, because the difficulty curve does not start at “hard” and climb. It starts somewhere past “hard” and keeps going.
The short version
- The prize: $1,000,000, held in a vault behind a code
- The scale: 91 locations in total, spread across the ad, a second website and other creators’ videos
- The entrants: about 268,000 registered solvers
- The winner: Colin Sanders, a 32-year-old software developer from the Atlanta area who goes by DoctorXOR online
- The first crack: a belt covered in colored Xs, decoded using the 25-pair color code used in telecom wiring
The clue that broke it open
Sanders was not watching the game. His sister-in-law texted him the link with a single word: “Go.” His family knows he likes puzzles. By then the ad had already been out for an hour, so he assumed someone else would have it by morning and went to bed.
Nobody had it by morning. He watched the ad and noticed the belt immediately.
The multicolored stitching was not decoration. It was the 25-pair color code, a notation used in telecommunications hardware where two twisted wires of different colors combine to form one of 25 possible pairings. Drop the letter Z and you have an alphabet. The pairs on the belt spelled out Lima, Peru.
What is telling is his reaction to solving it. He did not think the puzzle was easy. He put Lima into a spreadsheet and concluded the opposite: “That one happened to be easy for me, but it was going to be difficult for most people, and that was itself a signal. It meant there was a real team behind this that knew what it was doing.”
He is a software developer with an electrical engineering background. The odds of any given viewer recognizing a 25-pair color code on sight are close to zero. That was the design.
All 12 clues hidden in the ad itself
MrBeast’s own walkthrough covers the 12 locations buried in the commercial. Reading them in one sitting is the best way to understand why 268,000 people mostly got nowhere.
| Hidden in | The method | Answer |
|---|---|---|
| Colored bills in the tent | Dollar values converted to letters, giving “Cash Tent” | Tashkent, Uzbekistan |
| The belt | Eight colored Xs read as the 25-pair telecom color code | Lima, Peru |
| Numbers around the vault door | Matched to the international Scrabble lexicon, producing a sentence about a hospital he funded | Accra, Ghana |
| A flashing yellow bulb | Morse code, but only readable with the footage reversed | Kabul, Afghanistan |
| White tape on a clipboard | Matched against the clipboard’s front to read “capital of East Nusa Tenggara” | Kupang, Indonesia |
| 26 lasers by the door | Firing order mapped to letters, giving “laser mixup” | Arles, France |
| Screens in the background | Macro colors converted to base 3, then to letters, giving “Beast City Hub” | Toronto, Canada |
| Emojis on a Slack screen | First two letters of each of the five emoji names | Casablanca, Morocco |
| A smoke grenade canister | What looked like “1+1=?” was actually S, T and “one”, painted in yellow | Yellowstone, Wyoming |
| Dots on a door | Counted, then matched to periodic table symbols such as La for lanthanum | Lahore, Pakistan |
| A tank turret | An “I” plus Munch’s The Scream reads as “Ice Cream”; the numbers matched a $36,348.26 Bananas Foster from an old video | New Orleans, Louisiana |
| The closed captions | Letters next to dashes spell “Seven Letter Big Lodge”, read as “Tall Inn” | Tallinn, Estonia |
MrBeast has said the tank turret was his personal favorite, and it is easy to see why. It requires you to read a painting as a word, then cross-reference a five-figure number against the price of a dessert in a video from years earlier. That is not a clue you solve. That is a clue you stumble into after solving forty others.
The ad was only the beginning
Twelve locations would have been a substantial puzzle on its own. It was not close to the whole thing.
Locations were seeded across social media, with other creators posting videos that each concealed one. A billboard along a freeway held two: numbers on a dial that resolved to Dimtu in Ethiopia, and an underline whose letters, read backwards, gave Nome, Alaska. A second phase later added 40 more on a separate site.
Then came the part that makes the whole thing click. Once you had the cities, you drew great circles between them, the mathematical term for a circle running perfectly around a sphere. Those lines formed letters and numbers across the map. That gave you the first nine characters of the vault code.
The puzzle was not a list of riddles. It was a single object that only became readable once you had almost all of it.
Nobody solved this alone
After about three days, Sanders concluded the hunt was too large to brute-force by himself. He returned to a Discord community he had been part of for years and found 60 or 70 people already working a channel on it. His condition for joining was that he had to be able to contribute immediately, so he found two puzzles where the group had an intermediate answer but had not pushed it to a location, and closed them out.
The team eventually migrated into Slack, which is a detail Salesforce presumably enjoyed, and used Slackbot to keep track of what had and had not been checked. Sanders built puzzle cards for everything so nothing got dropped.
What the winner says makes a puzzle good
- Internal logic that holds. A great puzzle has connections that do not break under pressure.
- Artistry over volume. He is drawn to minimalist puzzles with themes and symbolism, not sheer quantity.
- No fragile chains. His example of lazy design: putting a rubber duck and a locked box in the same drawer where the combination is “DUCK”.
- Restraint with red herrings. Too many false trails make a hunt frustrating rather than hard.
Why a company spent this much effort on a 30-second slot
A Super Bowl spot costs several million dollars and buys you a few seconds of attention. What Salesforce and MrBeast built instead was a campaign that ran for weeks, pulled in 268,000 registered participants, and generated an enormous volume of collaborative discussion on Discord, Slack and YouTube while people worked on it. The ad was the entry point, not the product.
It also sits neatly inside how MrBeast’s business has been moving. This is a creator who has been steadily building infrastructure rather than just videos, including buying a banking app aimed at younger users. A branded puzzle that runs for a month and produces a real winner is closer to a product launch than a commercial.
The wider creator economy has been drifting the same way. Markiplier’s GoPro stake turning into an eight-figure position is a different flavor of the same story: the money is increasingly in what creators own rather than what they upload. And on the platform side, YouTube’s recent change to how views are counted means the raw numbers attached to campaigns like this one are not directly comparable to last year’s.
Bottom line
The most interesting thing about the MrBeast puzzle is not the million dollars. It is that the winning move was recognizing an obscure telecommunications standard on a belt buckle, and that even the person who did that concluded within minutes he could not finish it alone.
If you want to try the leftovers, there are reportedly 79 further cryptic locations seeded across MrBeast’s other videos, including a “million dollar playlist” of nine clips linked from a video description. No prize is attached to those as far as anyone can tell. Given how the first hunt went, that may not stop people.
