There is something about Mumkey that always attracts him to lolcows that screw him over. I am not sure if he is just laughing at them or if it's something else. It's becoming a bit questionable.
I think it’s Mumkey trying to kickstart things and get the cows producing content.
He was smart enough to ensure beforehand that everyone who donated to Derek would get a full refund if necessary.
I feel like if it was him putting too much faith in them or whatever, he’d have just been like “yeah go ahead and donate to this thing!” without any talk of refunds. He pretty clearly saw a risk factor here and took precautions to avoid screwing over his fans. A lesser man would’ve neglected to think ahead and just shrugged his shoulders and said “oopsie daisy!” when the thing fell through and the fans all got screwed over.
Why Mumkey went along with this despite the VERY questionable amount of money that was being requested is a good question, though I’m guessing that he figured that it didn’t really matter all that much in the long run as long as we got more content to laugh at out of it.
Judging by his language in the most recent video on the subject, it seems to me like Mumkey had an issue with that amount of money being asked for the whole time, but didn’t say anything until it was apparent that he wasn’t gonna get what he wanted from Derek.
To be fair to Derek, though, Mumkey makes it seem like Derek had said that the only reason he needed the 25k was to feed everyone. That’s NOT what Derek said, he just used that as an example (his language was something like “catering alone costs a lot of money”).
I think overall Mumkey comes out of this unscathed, because he didn’t really do anything to fuck his fans over or anything, but he did still change his tune when things stopped going how he wanted them to.