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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Linus Tech Tips
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Out of the loop, can someone give me a tl;dr on who this guy is why I keep seeing this everywhere?
Linus Sebastian is a YouTube tech guru that rose to prominence in the last few years with his channel, Linus Tech Tips, and has created something of an enterprise around his content called Linus Media Group
More recently his work has become somewhat...sloppy, with errors here and there, recommended practices ignored on the odd occasion, but nothing so big as to cause anyone major damage. Linus has a default PR mode for when these issues come about, and it usually worked...
Until last month.
Last month, Linus reviewed a prototype of an all new type of water-cooling block (basically a replacement for a fan that can be way more efficient) for GPUs. This block was expensive, and expensive to make, but by all reasonable measures, has a very good cooling impact to show for it. It was made by a startup firm of two people, and they sent Linus a prototype with a supported GPU.
The GPU ended up disappearing into the aether, and Linus opted to use an unsupported GPU to test the cooling block, which resulted in inferior cooling performance. Linus ended up trashing the block in his review.
He then went and auctioned off the prototype without the knowledge of the manufacturer, only offering to make them whole once it had already been auctioned off.
Linus tried to deal with it in his usual PR way, once Gamers Nexus started reporting on the goings on. But these weren't small errors, these were the mother of all PC tech journalistic fuckups, and he refused to acknowledge them as such. That is not only enough to get someone immediately fired, it's enough to get them industry-blacklisted.
It's gotten so bad that the CEO and CFO of Linus Media Group have come out directly and thrown Linus under the bus for his fuckery.
And that's before we come on to the topic of this post, the SA allegations...
Edit: minor name corrections.
There's a few bits more around this that have come to light that makes it even worse....
The manufacturer emailed asking for the cooling block to be returned as it was their only prototype and LMG said they would return it, with the manufacturer chasing several times before LMG admitted that they had auctioned it off for charity.
They only offered compensation once the situation had been revealed in that expose video the other day.
The way I see it, this could well be a career ender for Linus. He gets his hands on novel, unreleased hardware, and then he botches the review and gives it to the highest bidder. Potentially a competing company.
No one is going to trust him with their pre-release hardware ever again after this.
Heck, if this was any reasonably sized company, I suspect we'd already be hearing about lawsuit settlements of significant sums of cash.
Its definitely going to wipe out any standing he has with others in the industry: he gave a scathing review about a prototype that they had failed to correctly install, despite clear instructions with a compatible GPU card sent to them. Add that to the constant incorrect and misinformation that is often caught in post production with on-screen corrections
It seems that allure of increasing revenue streams with a ridiculous production turnaround had a direct impact on their quality and integrity and now with the allegations that Madison has come forward with, it would appear the rot had set in long before it was noticeable to external parties.
Its going to play out over the next week or so whether LMG is in a death spiral.
Yeah...any one of these issues would be bad enough...the whole trifecta does not bode well at all for Linus.