Wefunder "investors" aren't real investors. The company isn't public, the "investors" don't have stock, and the only terms are that if - IF - Fishtank sells, the WeFunder "investors" basically have a pre-order on stock to be sold in the sale. The S3 house being under Sam's name doesn't do anything with regards to the WeFunder "investors". The WeFunder "investors" don't get dividends or a split of profits or anything like that.
This isn't an IPO, it's a GoFundMe. WeFunder "investors" are not shareholders. There is no fiduciary duty to the WeFunder "Investors" and even if there were, this arrangement wouldn't run afoul of that. If FishTank LLC owned the house and made 3 million dollars profit, not a cent of that would go to any of the WeFunder "investors".
This is pretty spot on, and the chance of it going public is basically nil. From what I remember the fund raise was pre-burt season. It all was really riding on the Burt season IMHO and they simply don't get enough viewers and have so many inherent legal and other issues that the project doesn't look like it can scale up in the way Jeet Averageson and Sam Hyde want it to with space and pirateship themed seasons.
They do have some interesting ideas, but they need tens of millions of dollars to make it tenable and I don't think they actually have the acumen to make it happen with consistency and to scale it up as needed - it is simply a bit too niche if anything.
They'd need like a constant 100k viewers and a lot more income when you look at all the costs involved.
There are tons of similar GoFundMe-like websites to launch projects for everything from video games to fishtank concepts. Very, very few of them are successful enough to deliver returns and the amount they got from the funding (around a million) wasn't really substantial enough to bootstrap the project further.
Given the lack of acumen and I guess immaturity present in the way they manage fishtank (even if it is entertaining) it seems extremely unlikely that they'll get spaceship/pirateship themed events with extravagant set pieces and the kind of production quality and consistency that would attract 100k viewers.
There definitely is a market for what they're selling and its a compelling idea but I don't think they can scale this puppy up in its present form.
edit: They also only ever managed to get one advertiser which wasn't very good. The only way they can really make it work is premium subs (which have limitations) and way more product placement - they'd need an advertiser to put serious, serious money behind it to make it work because in the niche space it is in so many people just pirate the show and most of the useful discussion about it occurs out of their space (for example this thread is way better to follow the show than their shitty spammy chat).
They really should've done something productive with the chat shit on-site to make it actually usable and because they didn't its just constant spam and people use other websites to follow it.