Linus Gabriel Sebastian & Linus Media Group / Linus Tech Tips - Narcissistic corporate shill YouTuber driving his media empire into the ground. KILL COUNT: 2

[seri0us]

The only reason I doubt this is that I don't think he's that smart.

Yes, but his wife handles the finances and likely is.

 

[Kheapathic]

Here are LTT's self-reported revenue sources as of 2020

View attachment 4657603

This is more of a personal gripe, and probably because my main cow is DSP; but YouTubers talking about finances in any manner always seems like a bad move to me. You run a business Linus, file your taxes and all appropriate paperwork, and let spergs search the paperwork for the specifics. Content or not, don't fucking broadcast this shit.

Second, Linus learnt nothing from his house and will use Wi-Fi 6 on the entire office which will have heavy equipment that uses a lot of power that don't need to comply to the RF requirements that a home appliance does.

I don't know what he has there but industrial laser cutter for example, emmits so much RF that a microwave is nothing near it

At least he knows his staff won't be fucking around on their cellphones during work hours. Also, warehouse type structures don't have good acoustics; whatever happens on one end of the building is heard quite well on the other. Any sort of heavy machinery noise is gonna be a pain in the ass for everyone else.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

At least he knows his staff won't be fucking around on their cellphones during work hours. Also, warehouse type structures don't have good acoustics; whatever happens on one end of the building is heard quite well on the other. Any sort of heavy machinery noise is gonna be a pain in the ass for everyone else.

Not to mention he will almost assuredly put the bare legal minimum into safety equipment and pressure the staff to buy their own good stuff. Quality noise cancelling headgear that's built to deal with exactly that scenario? Nah, you'll get Chinesium earplugs on a string and a a link to an unboxing video channel playlist going over 'prosumer' noise cancelling gear that probably isn't even rated for an actual industrial floor.

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

View attachment 4651288
Linus updates everyone on the status of the Labs and Logistics. Also makes a joke in the opening about how LTT is hemorrhaging money.

i love how he spends most of the video being smug/sardonic about how much money each station/project is spending, including this one bit where he reveals how much he is paying for warehouse space that is so un-used his staff just slapped some couches in to serve as a makeshift lounge, in the middle of a fucking warehouse

 

[ZipDisk]

Holy shit, none of his employees respect him.
One of the dan's, the black haired one, appears to just break things and grin.
Also, Target managed to get through Ublock on the video.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

Holy shit, none of his employees respect him.
One of the dan's, the black haired one, appears to just break things and grin.
Also, Target managed to get through Ublock on the video.

Why would they respect him - He consistently makes it exceedingly clear that he sees his staff as an expense to be minimized. That doesn't explicitly mean that he doesn't care about them or anything, but it does mean that he doesn't respect their work to be a valuable thing that he benefits from, but rather a cost he must endure to generate his revenue. Its a common attitude in 1,000 head corps, but really cold and callous when you've got few enough people as to realistically know the majority of them by name.

When your boss see's you as an expense to be reduced, you see your boss as a means to an end. I wouldn't respect him, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to either.

 

[ZipDisk]

Yeah, but they just buy shit on his credit card. He was visibly pissed about the curved monitor, and Dan was like "yeah, I used to use a normal one"
Later on he finds a 3090 and 4090 just sitting in a room.

I wonder if he's already out of money and just doesn't know it. The warehouse seemed cursed the first time they were there, and now it's worse.

Hell, the thumbnail was "insurance" lightning.

 

[Foghorns at a Funeral]

Seeing the new video about how much money they are putting in to the place. It is clear he does read hate comments and seethes about it. He does that bullshit where if he """""takes the joke"""""" from you and says it himself, it can no longer affect him and you have to move out and find a new joke.
I really don't see how these new video tests are going to be a winner for him. Are LTT viewers ones for sticking around for 30 mins of tech info? Full of bar charts and in depth info. What gets me saying this, is that he said i think on WAN show that they are cutting the music opening, it is a like a 8 second animation and jingle. Because the stats from youtube said people would click off the video during it. So this does not make sense, viewers are so ADHD ridden that they can't take 8 seconds of jingle. But will sit through 30 mins of bar charts?
Gamers Nexus have the long form almost boring tech info dumps on lock, so does level1techs as well. And they only get like 100.000 to 500.000 views a video. That could cover a small office team like GN. But not LTTs expansive company and expensive toys. Some of LTTs best videos for views are stuff like, buying chink shit from Wish and making a pc from it. The type of video's such as "I hooked up my wife's boyfriend to a pc to cool it".
Part of me is thinking he is going to start banding round all the tech company's marketing departments trying to lean on them to put LTT labs approved stickers on their newest bullshit under threat of a negative video. Because selling a license to a LTT approved sticker is going to be worth more than a video that few of his audience even watch.

 

[74164978231]

Here are LTT's self-reported revenue sources as of 2020

View attachment 4657603

Seeing that revenue breakdown, Im not really sure how spending ungodly amounts of money on highly technical equipment like a 3d metal printer, the lab quality acoustics test setup or the $200k PSU review machine is supposed to be profitable for his channel all while supporting 100+ employees.

Clickbait would be profitable when everyone else is supplying the clickbait(and you can double dip putting an ad in a sponsored video), but when hes spending easily millions to himself on the clickbait?

 

[Super Nemesis 64]

Linus updates everyone on the status of the Labs and Logistics. Also makes a joke in the opening about how LTT is hemorrhaging money.

I asked about the machine shop they set up a few years ago. They bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machine tools.

It's tax racket.​

By spending money on something like 'Research & Development,' there are all sorts of assistance available, including grants and tax perks. So now they have a laboratory paying the wages of people who develop techniques of testing and benchmarking. Don't be surprise if they also carry out more and more of the actual benchmarking too, which will then fall under R & D.

I have not been paying attention to the LTT lab, but it really looks like it has been taken over by mission creep. While I can understand some of the purchases, it seems like any random idea just gets approved now. On another note, you can tell Linus is stretched thin and has lost some control of his company. Like @ZipDisk, I noticed multiple times where Linus would be puzzled about why somebody was using something, or where they got it from. While he has done that before, in this video he seems very bothered by all of it.

From the hemorrhaging joke, he sounds like he is just saying "FUCK IT" and sparing no expense, while the world is going into a major recession/depression. Tax grants and write offs can explain some of it, but that doesn't sound sustainable. So, how much debt is Linus willing to let himself get into for his fancy lab?

 

[ZipDisk]

And he's talking about hiring 12 more rando shitbags, when the ones he already has suck!

 

[AN/ALR56]

i love how he spends most of the video being smug/sardonic about how much money each station/project is spending, including this one bit where he reveals how much he is paying for warehouse space that is so un-used his staff just slapped some couches in to serve as a makeshift lounge, in the middle of a fucking warehouse

I really feel like he's one bad drama or meltdown away from a thread.
Honestly someone smarter than me should make a thread on PG just to get something going when he inevitably bankrupts himself or burns his hands in a twitter/YouTube fight.

 

[Slav Power]

I really feel like he's one bad drama or meltdown away from a thread.
Honestly someone smarter than me should make a thread on PG just to get something going when he inevitably bankrupts himself or burns his hands in a twitter/YouTube fight.

Generally speaking this thread right here has became Linus' lolcow thread, all it's missing is a comprehensive OP, a title change and a TTS request to move it to IF. Perhaps I could make a new OP draft in PG so that people could collaborate on it.

 

[AN/ALR56]

Generally speaking this thread right here has became Linus' lolcow thread, all it's missing is a comprehensive OP, a title change and a TTS request to move it to IF. Perhaps I could make a new OP draft in PG so that people could collaborate on it.

Seems like a good idea.

 

[Slav Power]

Okay, I've made a PG thread for the sake of making a new OP: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/new-o...ian-linus-media-group-linus-tech-tips.153701/

It's probably better to work on that there rather than trying to do it here alongside all the current discussion.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

On another note, you can tell Linus is stretched thin and has lost some control of his company.

The thing is, this isn't even unexpected. At a certain scale and growth, you more or less have to sign off significant authority and power to immediate leaders who you can trust to not have to report every single little thing to you for your approval. Linus clearly is uncomfortable with this and wants to second guess every decision. Whether its because he put immature people in charge who are happy to approve 'incidental' spends like a new monitor without giving thought to bigger organizational issues like standardization and hardware refresh cycles (assuming they bother at all) or he's just overreacting to someone drawing hardware from inventory that hasn't been used for anything for a while is hard to say. But I'd wager on him not picking leaders that understand boundaries and roles, considering his own leadership style.

From the hemorrhaging joke, he sounds like he is just saying "FUCK IT" and sparing no expense, while the world is going into a major recession/depression. Tax grants and write offs can explain some of it, but that doesn't sound sustainable. So, how much debt is Linus willing to let himself get into for his fancy lab?

None of its sustainable, tax write-off is a meme. You get to deduct some of the cost of some set of purchases from an organization when its investing in equipment, but you get to deduct it from the profits, not just magically undo the expense. Afaik, Labs is its own company, so you lose a lot of the opportunities to play games shuffling money and credits around. Its likely that he's just chasing the sunk cost fallacy at this point, figuring if he's put this much money into it, he might as well see it through to the end so it wasn't wasted. Only to realize that talented skilled engineers who can do this stuff and run this equipment are rare and expensive, fully aware of their worth, and completely uninterested in taking bottom barrel salaries because "You get to be on camera for youtube dude! You'll be a youtuber!". He got away with it on LTT because he just needed to find nerds who wanted to be well known, and he got away with it on creator studios because its mostly warehousing and product design, they're not special and there's no shortage of workers. He's not gonna get away with it here, and he's going to be paying an arm and a leg in salaries alone for them to not yield much while he's still buying random equipment and shit.

Its not just that the idea was bad, but that the idea was poorly executed, and clearly built up backwards from what it actually needed. It feels like he just hired everyone first, then started asking for test results and hodgepodge buying in whatever equipment they needed to actually do the testing. There should have been a much cleaner way to start this that didn't result in a year of 20+ engineers and support staff sitting on payroll with their thumbs up their asses.

 

[mandatorylurk]

He will never do it but he needs to send a firm warning to people to knock it the fuck off and create real boundaries. Of all the things he showed in the Lab tour video, what annoyed me the most was Jake setting up the card reader at the front door to say something when Linus swiped his card, this time being "The Tech Tips Guy Himself." Jake gets away with way too much and it no longer becomes friendly banter but a guy who seems to upend everything on a whim because of a joke, he has a blank check it seems to do whatever he wants whenever he wants.

Dan, he seems older than Linus and also seems to have real skills in audio and wiring and I think that shows in how he doesn't pay Linus too much attention, he know he has him by the balls with regards to things right now such as setting up the office computers and doing more of the physical, hands-on things of networking. He'll get it done, leave him alone, which is impossible for Linus to do. Trying to corner him a bit on the workstation he was building, even though it was for WAN show which Linus said he wanted, no wonder Dan just says fuck it and takes a 43" OLED monitor for his desk.

 

[Flaming Dumpster]

(Source, Archive)
He is one of Linus' original guys and when trying to figure out how long Dennis had been involved, I found this tweet

(Source, Archive)
Abandoning a sinking ship?

 

[Miller]

Like @ZipDisk, I noticed multiple times where Linus would be puzzled about why somebody was using something, or where they got it from. While he has done that before, in this video he seems very bothered by all of it.

I think it was in one of the early Intel-sponsored upgrade videos that he found out that one of his asian employees stole some of the LTT equipment. His reaction was to smile and take it as a joke but I doubt he was really amused.

 

[batigol]

I think it was in one of the early Intel-sponsored upgrade videos that he found out that one of his asian employees stole some of the LTT equipment. His reaction was to smile and take it as a joke but I doubt he was really amused.

When the boss, even if he is the owner, sets the precedent of taking review items home (and getting review items for the express purpose of taking them home) the employees are going to think it's fine to do too. Don't want employees taking shit home, then live by your own rules.