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

[Slav Power]

Linus Gabriel Sebastian / Linus Media Group / Linus Tech Tips
​

Linus Gabriel Sebastian (born August 20 1986) is a Canadian YouTuber that has founded Linus Media Group and is married to an Asian wife by the name of Yvonne Ho. He started off as an NCIX employee, a Canadian computer hardware store that is now bankrupt. There he was asked to do product review videos for NCIX, however due to budget constraints he created a new channel on November 25th 2008 by the name of Linus Tech Tips to make lower budget videos without affecting NCIX's brand.

However by 2012 he would have a falling out with NCIX, leading to the founding of the aformentioned Linus Media Group and running the LTT channel under his own company. Since then it has grown exponentially, opening new divisions such as Floatplane Media on April 3rd 2017 and Creator Warehouse on September 17th 2018, and with time the direction his company and content took has changed drastically to the point where nowadays Linus and his media enterprise has became somewhat of a laughingstock due to many bad financial decisions as well as very questionable behavior and statements in the videos.

Due to the sheer amount of topics connected to this one man I believe it is best to first look at him and his behavior, then at his company and the way he operates it and finally talk about his employees, who are as, if not more exceptional than Linus himself.

1. Linus Gabriel Sebastian
Linus was always a weird kid. When he was a kid he only had two friends, and he was diagnosed with ADHD. When he was in grade 6 he changed schools, where on the first day someone called him a faggot, and he reacted to it by telling the entire class that it's very hurtful language, which resulted in him having the nickname "Faggot" for many years, including high school where he decided to dye his hair hot pink.

Linus has married Yvonne Ho in 2011, who serves as the current CFO of Linus Media Group. He also is a father of three mixed race children, a son and two daughters.


In June of 2020 for some reason Linus has decided to send a tweet about benefits of race mixing. Not from his personal account however, he used his business account to do so.


2. Linus Media Group

By the end of 2016 the style of thumbnails on the channel has changed, and with time they became more and more obnoxious.


3. LMG Employees
Linus' company has over 80 employees, and many of those employees also happen to be quite eccentric themselves. Therefore it's worth talking about some of the most exceptional individuals in the whole group.

Anthony Young / Emily Young

Anthony works as a writer in LMG, and he has been a star of multiple LMG videos as well. He is probably the most outstanding out of all the employees, in that he is the only morbidly obese person in the team, which is definitely jarring in his on-camera appearances. In the Intel Extreme Tech Upgrade video we can see that his house seems to be rather poorly furnished, and also as the part of the upgrade he has bought a VR headset, with the idea of it helping him exercise to lose weight, however since the two years from the time this video first came out, we can see he hasn't lost a single kilogram of weight.

Also worth noting is the sheer amount of animal plushies he has in his house. Seems to be a weird choice of decoration for a fully grown man.

What is also outstanding about him is the fact that he seems to be the most knowledgeable employee in terms of things like Linux and emulation. Now, if this sounds to you like something people in the trans community tend to be very well-versed in, you wouldn't be too far off in that assumption. Anthony has openly supported trans rights on Twitter, as well as he believes Kiwi Farms is responsible for murder of Near, which is what the trans community wants people to believe, as in reality Near has tried to extort Null and there are no legal documents that would prove Near is in fact dead.



This, with the fact that Anthony seems to like having long hair, might be indicating that some time in the near future he might transition, and even he will have a dedicated thread on this site, if all the estrogen begins to take effect on his mental well-being.

Now, if you thought that Anthony had all the warning signs of trooning out, you'd be right, as on May 27th 2023, Anthony has publicly came out as Emily, after which it also turned out that his presumed wife who is as morbidly obese as Anthony was also a MtF troon, and it also turned out that through all this time Anthony had a furry alt by the name of Runefox, with his fursona being a hermaphrodite fox, with him even commissioning porn of it.

Business info
Linus Media Group
HQ: 101-18643 52nd Avenue, Surrey, British Columbia, V3S 8E5, Canada
Business Number (BN): 847835931
Registry ID: BC0951860
Registered: 02.10.2012

Floatplane Media
HQ: 101-18643 52nd Avenue, Surrey, British Columbia, V3S 8E5, Canada
Business Number (BN): 721408490
Registry ID: BC1113792
Registered: 03.04.2017

Creator Warehouse
HQ: 107-18651 52nd Avenue, Surrey, British Columbia, V3S 8E5, Canada
Business Number (BN): 734117310
Registry ID: BC1179625
Registered: 17.09.2018

Links

YouTube channels
Linus Tech Tips - Main channel
Techquickie - Explanation of various tech related topics
ShortCircuit - Tech products unboxing
TechLinked - Tech news summary
Channel Super Fun - Real-life non-tech tomfoolery
They're Just Movies - Movie review channel
LMG Clips - Clips from WAN Show
Mac Address - Apple centric channel

---

Yes, the OP is unfinished, lackluster and doesn't cover shit. Bite me. I can't do this by myself.

 

[King Fructose]

Oh boy. I'm definitely watching this thread...

That being said, I wouldn't shit on Anthony too hard. I mostly respect the man for being one of the only actually knowledgeable people at LMG, even if some of his ideas and interests outside of work are a little questionable.
Linus on the other hand...he's going downhill fast. He seems to be getting worse with every WAN show.

 

[GHTD]

Not defending LMG in any way (I think his videos are garbage on the basis alone of having to whore his wealth), but the section about Anthony acknowledging trans people and Linus promoting race-mixing seems more you have a bone to pick than disliking how his channel is going. Yeah, he probably should've done the race-mixing stuff on his personal Twitter, I will give you that.

 

[Joe Swanson]

That being said, I wouldn't shit on Anthony too hard. I mostly respect the man for being one of the only actually knowledgeable people at LMG, even if some of his ideas and interests outside of work are a little questionablel

The dude is a furfag and still legitimately thinks that this site killed Byuu. He's practically one meltdown away from lolcowdom

 

[Slav Power]

Not defending LMG in any way (I think his videos are garbage on the basis alone of having to whore his wealth), but the section about Anthony acknowledging trans people and Linus promoting race-mixing seems more you have a bone to pick than disliking how his channel is going. Yeah, he probably should've done the race-mixing stuff on his personal Twitter, I will give you that.

The thread is meant to be generally aimed at the entirety of LMG, and that includes various employees sperging out online. So mentioning Linus' race mixing and Anthony being a borderline lolcow is on purpose. I'd write up something on Riley but he's just an obnoxious presenter, I don't recall him saying something stupid.

 

[JoshPlz]

It was about time he got a thread. Steve Burke has been a superior alternative for ages: https://www.youtube.com/c/GamersNexus

Edit: There have been instances where Steve called out Linus for his paid shilling of certain companies and being hilariously wrong in general, but I can't seem to find the videos after a quick search. May have not been in the title or description. May have been on twitter. Would make good content for the OP if found.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Anthony is fat and should shave his head. Alex smokes a pound of weed every day at work, he even laughs like Shaggy. If he's not sucking cock daily Linus shouldn't have that many earrings. Flat wife.

 

[libRT]

Linus always struck me as the over-excitable idiot in the IT class. Wouldn't surprise me if theres a lot of lolcow material that hasn't surfaced yet.

 

[quaawaa]

Here's a summary of the OCCT drama mention in the OP:

After Linus went on his holier-than though rant about how ad-blocking is equal to piracy, a developer of a benchmarking tool called OverClock Checking Tool (OCCT) noticed that Linus had used his software in videos without paying for a commercial license. The dev only cared about enforcing his software's license after a friend showed him that Linus is a greedy hypocrite.

Linus' video using the pirated software:

Friend’s Reddit Post (Archive):

Dev’s original Reddit post (Archive) calling Linus out:

EDIT 2 : LTT just bought a Pro license
EDIT :
Thanks everyone for all the support and comments I did not expect this to blow up like this ! Your support is really heartwarming.
This thread got crossposted on r/LinusTechTips , but it got locked by moderators. This is a good sign that they are aware of the issue !



Original post :
Context :
I'm making this a dedicated post since things blew up in the post about the Newegg controversy, following this comment :
https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/srb92k/holy_sht_people/hwrbhts/
TL;DR : Linus tech tips use OCCT in their videos ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJnrMNCahxc&t=270s ) and they didn't pay for a Pro license, which raised controversy in my Discord at that time, and mixed feelings. Aeryn brings that up, and it blew up, with mentions to their "adblock = piracy" stuff among others.
Seems my answer isn't publicly readable in that thread for some reason, and as it's far in the comments section, I thought it was a good idea to put it here. I jnust hope i'm not wrong. Sorry if I am !


My original answer :

OCCT dev here. I read the whole comment thread (wow, that blew up), and felt like I had to give my personal view of this.

Let me draw the whole picture quickly : i'm the sole dev behind the project (and I always have been a solo dev), and it's currently downloaded 20k+ times per day. I made that my main job due to COVID events since early 2021, and currently, i'm not making ends meet with the project, and if things continue that way, i'll have to put OCCT as a side job again, despite its huge success.

OCCT has been around for 18 years now, and has been free for personal use only for like 10+ years, at least. It's not new it's forbidden for professional / commercial use. Don't ask me when exactly, but it's been 10 years+ at least. I think it was since OCCT 2.0.

I'll say how I felt about this, without filtering anything.

First reaction was "OMFG I finally am featured on a popular youtube channel !". I was on JayZ's channel already (he used a very old version), and now on LTT, I was thoroughly REALLY happy.

Then, after a few minutes, it starts to hit you.

Did they contact you ? No. Did they pay for a license ? No. Are they out of bounds ? yeah.

Now, should I care about that ? That's the tough part. They have tremendous power. They make a video saying OCCT sucks ? I'm dead. No matter how 18 years of being "useful" are, i'm as good as dead. They can pronounce a death sentence instantly. GamerNexus, Jayz, and a lot of others can.

I never go the fight route with anyone, but here, even less so, like a David/Goliath stuff.

They also give me visibility, and that's a good thing already

Would I have offered them a free license with an email ? HELL YES. Why wouldn't I ? I mean, it's free ads for OCCT, and it can only benefit us both. So in the end, it was just boiling down to not being "nice".

I let the matter be, as I enjoyed +15% visits for a few days following this, and tried to forget about it.

Then, developing OCCT further, I tried to reach out to youtubers, as they started making content about software. Remember the CTR/Hydra craze a few months ago ? Yeah, around that time. I was introducing my benchmarks, with a new take, and tried to get attention. I emailed the 3 top youtube channels I knew : JayZ, LTT, and GamersNexus. I got a response from GamerNexus, which led to nowhere (I was still very happy about getting answered though, thanks !), and none from the two others.

Don't get me wrong - i'm not a special snowflake. I don't deserve answers. They are so big they can view me as an insect, easily, we just don't compare. But then, you realize the sole one that replied you was the one that wasn't using your work to make some of their content. I don't know if they do use OCCT regularly, I just know they did for sure, but still, it was a bitter taste.

So here I was, having no attention from major youtube channels dedicated to hardware/review, despite them using my work, and seeing them advertise CTR like crazy while the dev of CTR was being rude to his own community.

It all boils down to this : i'm not a marketer. I'm not a youtuber ( my videos are crappy). I'm not an entertainer. i'm a dev. People are so used to have OCCT around that they forget there's someone working behind it. I mean, 85% of my traffic comes from people googling OCCT, so it is a tad known

It's a lingering feeling. I read the twitter stuff about adblocking being piracy. Well, it's even more blatant in my case. I am down 10k€ of personal funds since I switched full time on OCCT since I need more money to support my family (and we aren't living the crazy life, I have 3 kids, my wife's working part time at minimum wage, so well...).

I felt like answering to their adblock is piracy tweet. It's like a big company complaining aboput not making even more money when I can't make ends meet, and it felt... unfair. Especially since they publicly "pirated" OCCT (i'm not sure you can say that since I would have given them a free license on the spot tbh).

I did not, being afraid of the consequences. I'm better off shutting my big mouth, and trying to increase slowly my income to support my family, rather than starting fires here and there, and put my "starting" business at a jeopardy.

Here's the whole picture, the situation. I'm not letting OCCT drop, i've been working on OCCT V11 like crazy (i'm at like 60 hours+ per week on it), hoping it'll be the version that makes me not worry about money anymore, and, that's a dream, being able to afford buying test hardware rather than constantly bug people I find here and there to let me access their computer to debug.

Am I mad ? no. It's just a lingering feeling of unfairness, and while you're experiencing it, you're always wondering if it's justified or not, if you're just being a special snowflake or a princess to whom everything is due. It's a complex feeling.

The times are to entertainers, not engineers, that's a fact

As a closing note, most companies are like that. Some are really nice. I'm not afraid to cite them : Asetek, NZXT, Cooler master, Videocardz,... they're all really, really nice people. They use OCCT, support me, and I even got an AIO for free from Asetek since I made a function they had the idea of (Steady mode) (I was beyond thrilled). But lots of others aren't. I did fight for 3 months with a popular graphic card manufacturer to make them pay for a Pro license when they were using it in their after-sale services (I had proof sent by a user).

It's a pretty common thing out there. So again, this is not isolated behavior, and also, I can understand it's tough to play nice with everyone and not make a mistake. On my end, it's just often... depressing

Linus posted a response on Linus Tech Tips' forum. In the response, he claims he had no idea that OCCT was commercial software (it has been paid-for-commercial-use software since before Linus started using it, as archives of the OCCT website show) and then justifies his actions by claiming that his use was educational and that it's okay to not pay for a license because he gave exposure to the software in the video. Reminder that this is a guy who just went on a rant about how blocking ads on his videos is tantamount to piracy.

Full response from Linus:

Linus here.

First and foremost, I'm sorry for any upset we caused by using OCCT without paying for a professional license. I've gone ahead and picked up a pro license to cover our use.



The truth is I had no idea OCCT was a paid software. There is a donation prompt in the application, but otherwise no indication that I should have been using a paid version.
Ignorance doesn't excuse our sloppy approach to software licensing here, though. The simple fact is we pirated your software (which as some of you realize I never said we were perfect about, and in fact have pointed out times when my own ethics aren't bothered by it, but whatever) but hopefully our purchase of a paid license will allow us to put this behind us.

There are some other aspects of your post that I could probably type out a longer reply to - like the insinuation that (even if we wanted to) LTT could somehow destroy your OCCT business, or that we don't reply to outreach (I searched our public email and we only have two emails containing the characters OCCT, and neither of them are from you), and the fact that honestly I've got a little bit of whiplash right now from how abruptly this went from "thanks for the shout-out" to "I'm upset enough to write a novel on reddit about it".

https://twitter.com/OCCT_Ocbase/status/1396932156610469890?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1396932156610469890|twgr^|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://linustechtips.com/index.php?app=coremodule=systemcontroller=embedurl=https://mobile.twitter.com/OCCT_Ocbase/status/1396932156610469890

Most devs recognize that our use of their software is closer to educational use than it is to commercial use and don't mind us using their software for free if we are demonstrating how to use it and showcasing it to potential customers on the channel. Based on this Twitter post, I assumed you felt the same way. I guess you don't.

But assumptions lead to disasters, and we absolutely should have reached out. Hopefully you can understand how the error occurred and we can put this behind us.

Source (Archive)

Linus didn't stop with just an out of touch forum post.
He also changed his Twitter profile picture to him wearing a pirate hat and eyepatch, which remains his profile picture as of this post (three months after the fact).
He then decided to profit off of this controversy by making and selling a shirt with the word "ADBLOCK" on it:

Source (Archive)

This is what the shirt design (Archive) ended up looking like:

And he dressed up in a half dozen pirate costumes to show it off:

Spoiler: More pictures of Linus showing off his new shirt

He also made his CTO, Luke Lafreniere, model the shirt as well:

Spoiler: More pictures of Luke dressed in Linus' cope shirt

Initial Reviews were mixed:

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Oh man oh man. My friend would link me LTT videos, and everytime I'd see the thumbnails I'd nope right out. Seriously don't know how anyone sees those cuckface thumbnails and thinks "Yeah, this is some content I want to watch".

 

[quaawaa]

Recently, Linus got attacked by the Queen Twitch Thot: Pokimane (who has her own thread here).
Pokimane made a stupid tweet about on how to improve advertising on Twitch (replace all in video ads with banner ads so that her viewers don't get interrupted) and Linus (correctly, IMO) called her on Twitter for it being a stupid and unprofitable idea. Pokimane did not notice his Tweet.

Linus later talked about this interaction on his podcast:

Pokimane found out about this and got really pissed off, particularly because Linus didn't mention her name and used a mocking voice when recounting her argument. She posted these iPhone Notes app screenshots in response to the above tweet:

which sicced her army of simps onto Linus.
Now at this point, you're probably wondering why this post is in the Linus thread, as Pokimane is acting far more lolcowish than he is. I'm posting it here because after that boomer blogpost, Linus wrote a groveling nine tweet apology to her, deleted his original tweet, asked to partner with her, and promised to never clip that part of his stream.

Linus' reply
And she graciously accepted his show of fealty:

Source (Archive of tweet thread)

 

[Autistic Spergout]

Never disabling my adblock faggot nor am I going to buy your useless shit

 

[Kochmess]

Dude always seemed extremely gay to me, with his little earrings, faggy voice and soyboy antics. I was surprised he had children, but not that it's a SEA monkey he's with.

Unsurprisingly the smooth brain also give his shit take on abortion.

 

[Slav Power]

View attachment 3273185
Dude always seemed extremely gay to me, with his little earrings, faggy voice and soyboy antics. I was surprised he had children, but not that it's an SEA monkey he's with.

View attachment 3273193
Unsurprisingly the smooth brain also give his shit take on abortion.

Fun fact: he also had a vasectomy.

 

[CryoRevival #SJ-112]

You mean Anthony isn't secretly Crunklord?

Heartbroken...

 

[quaawaa]

Linus often says stupid stuff on Twitter.

Some Examples:
Full context to the tweet highlighted in the OP:

Hasan Piker (who has a thread here) is a socialist Twitch streamer an anti-White racist who got temporarily banned on Twitch for calling people "cracker".
Linus decided to defend this (pics stolen from the Hasan thread):


Linus is also really pro-vaccine and hates anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers like any loyal Liberal Canadian would. He complained a lot about the 2022 Canadian Trucker Protests. Example:

Source (Archive)
Despite him following all the health rules, including mandating vaccines and masks at his company and vaccinating his very young kids, Linus caught covid:

Source (Archive)
It wasn't a minor case:

Source (Archive)

Source (Archive)
Someone replied to that tweet asking him to admit that the vaccine doesn't work, and Linus responded as a true follower of the Science™ should:

Source (Archive)

 

[libRT]

$10k per day just to cover payroll is $3.65 mil/year, how many employees does he have? I always thought it was small like 5-10 or so

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Oh man oh man. My friend would link me LTT videos, and everytime I'd see the thumbnails I'd nope right out. Seriously don't know how anyone sees those cuckface thumbnails and thinks "Yeah, this is some content I want to watch".

I'm told the cuckface thumbnails are just part of the YouTube meta and everyone has to do it, or at least another kind of obnoxious thumbnail. Probably to attract more kid viewers.

 

[Marche]

Gamersnexus is better.
Linus is a preachy faggot and paid shill for garbage tech.

 

[JoshPlz]

View attachment 3273344
$10k per day just to cover payroll is $3.65 mil/year, how many employees does he have? I always thought it was small like 5-10 or so

An unnecessarily high amount of 46 employees: https://linusmediagroup.com/our-team
No wonder he is flipping his shit over adblockers, lmao.

They are also selling overpriced merch, like this cheap chingchong screwdriver for 70$, perfect for tightening down chastity cuck cages:

https://www.lttstore.com/products/screwdriver

or this crappy, generic backpack for 250$:

https://www.lttstore.com/products/backpack