The Billet affair is super boring and always was. Their product is ridiculous and I actually don’t fault Linus for being so dismissive of it. Yeah they should have reshot the assembly parts of the video with a 3090, but it’s such a dumb product I can understand why he didn’t want to waste the time to do that.
And yeah he shouldn’t have sold it after agreeing to ship it back, but Billet also shouldn’t have expected it back in the first place. I’ve handled review samples, and there’s never any thought about sending them back once we’re done evaluating them. Those weren’t exactly prototypes and we sometimes did destructive wear analysis, so it’s not entirely the same, but if I were a small business sending a product to some reviewer hoping for publicity I wouldn’t expect it back, and if I was that reviewer I’d think it odd to be asked to return if.
The real issue here is Madison’s allegations, but it seems Reddit is perfectly content to throw a woman under the bus to protect some sex pest. How entirely uncharacteristic of them.