News from Gamers Nexus. Including some part about the response from Linus regarding the previous video. Linus really likes to jump the gun and digging holes for himself.
Seeing Linus not address about LMG agreed to send the protype back to Billet Labs, plus Billet Labs publicly stating “No, we never agreed to financial compensation, we asked for it to be returned” and Linus saying it was auctioned for charity makes Linus Media Group a thief.
Yes,I’m saying LMG stole the protype from Billet Laps since it was sold and not retuned.
Thievery implies intent. I think I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt here and say it not being returned may well have been unintentional, through carelessness or straight up hubris (“I can do whatever I want with stuff people send to me!”). Either way, it’s incredibly bad, but one is obviously worse than the other.
Billet Labs asked for it to be returned. LMG agreed the their request and told Billet Labs “Yes, we will return it to you.” Then LMG auctioned it off. LMG committed theft. There very well may be a valid legal case for Billet Labs to sue for punitive damages if LMG does not give them a sizeable amount of money.
I mean discovery will have to prove intent. What happened was shitty but we do have to remember there are about 120+ people in LTT. Billet labs probably emailed 1 person in the company twice, that person probably wasn’t in logistics or in the team that was organizing LTX. So this is likely a huge fuck up but I think people are acting like they did this just out of spite when really it seems to be an organizational issue that got swept up in the mix. Who ever is the contact for Billet Labs may honestly get their job axed since this is a pretty big fuck up. I know people are trying to paint Linus as the one who did this but I don’t think it is. We can blame him for his shit response and how he made it seem that they were already handling Billet Lab’s with compensation but maybe I’m being optimistic but I honestly think GN’s video was the first Linus has heard about what happened to the prototype besides maybe it being auctioned but I think he wasn’t aware it needed to be returned.
Why side note to start, why do people like start a conversation with “I mean…” when there was nothing said previously? That is a phrase usually reserved for when someone is clarify a previous statement regarding what they meant to say beforehand, that’s why I ask, how do initiate first contact with “I mean…”?
For LMG, the position of the person in contact with Billet Lab is irrelevent. In a healthy company, there is frequent contact between the different deparments during work. Interdepartment agencies. When someone at LMG got the request for the prototype to be returned, it would be their duty and responsivility to pass the memo on to the person(s) involved and notify them in the appropriate position of the request with a statement that it has to packaged up so the individuals who handle all incoming and outgoing packges can get it sent back to Billet Labs. It’s not the person who received the request that is then responsible for the packaging and mailing of it.
It’s different employees in that chain who are responsible and as they complete it they pass it on to the next in line in the process for getting it ready to go out.
We are outsiders in this situation. We don’t know where the failure is, it could be anyone in the chain. From the person who received the requests (who didn’t send it forward) to the people in logistics who were meant to handle the shipping/packaging of it (or any other person in the chain who messed up). My point was people are pinning blame on Linus and he is partly responsible seeing as he is the “owner” of the company but its pretty obvious he really wasn’t in the loop for much of this billet labs thing beside his decision not to reshoot the video.
I say the person who was the contact for Billet Labs was the likely broken link seeing as there were multiple messages and the logistics would probably have noticed the error of a part needing to be sent back being set to the auction for LTX.
I think people are acting like most companies are optimal business where there is little breakdown in these kind of things but from my own experience these kind of breakdowns can happen easily and sometimes very frequently. Many people sort of forget many of these youtube companies are small businesses that happen to expand on short notice. So many of them get stuck in the mindset of small businesses and that causes major problems down the line. A very similar example I see here is like Roosterteeth, who had a major falloff in recent years. They grew very rapidly and many of the problems revealed come back to their small business mindset not adapting with their expansion.
Intent like “I’m going to sell this thing”?
Or intent like “I’ve sold the thing and now will pocket the money”?
Intent as in “I know this doesn’t belong to me and I will acquire it and then exchange it for monetary value”
Your two scenarios happened yes, but any number of things could have happened before it that would remove intent to steal and exchange for money, like simply miscommunication between individuals (with their team size, it’s not too far fetched to see that happening)
It absolutely does not. If a package gets delivered to your house by mistake and you sell whatever it is, you are 100% liable for stealing someones mail. Doesn’t matter if you didn’t think the people would ever come for it and you didn’t mean to steal anything.
…unless you’re a tech reviewer that receives hundreds of products a month from people that never expects to get them back.
I don’t know how to be more clear on this, this is a failure on LTT’s part, no question. There should be better processes in place to prevent this from happening. But there’s a difference between knowingly and willfully pawning off something that they knew didn’t belong to them, and incompetently assuming everything everything they sell off has been vetted with the vendor. There’s a large enough team that a miscommunication could have broken down along the chain, somewhere between vendor reps and the person setting up that auction.
Whether intentional or not, they stole trade secrets. There might not be any legal repercussions of there wasn’t intent, but that’s incredibly unethical. Especially given Linus is a public investor in a tech startup, he used his platform to trash another startup and then give away their intellectual property.
Sure it’s unethical, lazy, sloppy, plus any number of adjectives. But as they say: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
Yep correct. LMG is engaging in criminal activities
I like LMG. They make some decent content, that’s easily understood. That being said, they’re handling this VERY badly. Shame on Linus, and LMG.
Linus has been sticking his foot in his mouth often enough that it’s starting to develop in to the persona he thinks he needs to/is supposed to have. The WAN Show is pretty much the only LTT content I care to watch anymore, but it has become increasingly common over the last ~year or more that he has a spicy take that gets embroiled in some mild controversy. But now he’s like “well this is the part of the show where I have spicy takes” and is almost actively looking to do it. I see Luke becoming increasingly frustrated with it too. Stepping down as CEO is probably the right call, but this move to “CVO” seems a little too lateral. I think Linus needs to pull back out of the spotlight, for the health of his company. But I really think he thinks his personality is the brand.
He likes and wants to be on camera, and he knows a ton from years in the industry, but I wonder if he wouldn’t be better as like… chief script advisor who also teaches other employees tips and tricks on how to compose videos, stage scenes, manage the flow of content, where to splice in B roll, how to read the weave of the youtube algorithm… They’ve grown remarkably, and I like what Linus states is the goal of the Labs project. But I worry he’s both becoming increasingly convinced his personality is an important part of the channel cachet, and also increasingly impulsive with regards to making decisions and spending money in an effort to go fast.
Stepping down as CEO is probably the right call, but this move to “CVO” seems a little too lateral. I think Linus needs to pull back out of the spotlight, for the health of his company. But I really think he thinks his personality is the brand.
If ownership hasn’t changed, and he’s still essentially the CEO’s boss since he selects them, it’s rearranging deck chairs. He hired someone to do administrative tasks.
Elon figured this move out pretty quickly.
I like what Linus states
I’ve only watched LMG content for a few months, but this out-of-context snippet sums up my feelings on the company.
Sebastian says that it’s a consumer-first, employee-second, profit-third company. But his actions don’t always support that.
Sebastian says that he doesn’t believe anyone should ever be a “fan” of anything because it’s irrational. But then he turns around and dismisses anyone who doesn’t show his brand absolute loyalty.
Sebastian says a lot of shit which sounds absolutely amazing if you can assume it’s true. And the problem is that you can’t assume that the company line is true coming from any company. You can just watch their business practices and make the best judgment on if the company seems honest. And Linus Sebastian, who effectively is the company as the owner and face of it, has increasingly come off as dishonest. It makes it damn near impossible to trust any of the good things he says that he does.
This is probably the most coherent take I’ve read. He’s having trouble taking it from a yt channel to an actual company, and it’s kicking his arse.
I’ve called this since the backpack warranty debacle. Linus needs to be pulled back to earth or risk having LTT lose their credibility.
There’s credibility in the first place? O_o I always assumed it’s like Top Gear for cars; it’s entertainment for younger people of its time.
I liked their budget build guides, it provided me with a baseline list of components depending on my available budget for the build. I’ve also based some of my decision regarding setting up my house networking from their videos.
TL:DR On this backpack warranty thing? I keep reading comments mentioning it, but I am not aware of what happened.
LTT made a 250 USD backpack. When people asked about the warranty, Linus basically said “trust me bro” and mocked people who voiced their concerns of buying a brand new quite expensive backpack without any warranty.
lol. amazing
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I think Linus is convinced that if they slow down at all, the entire company will collapse because they’ve grown so huge. They also ran up huge debt to build the Labs which will not start generating revenue for a long time.
Well, then it’s a good thing that he didn’t also blow a bunch of money on a mansion, a “true” mansion, and then a badminton court. That would have been a real waste of money that could have gone to a safety net for the company instead, so, you know, it’s great that he didn’t do anything like that.
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Not actually what I meant. I would have no idea if he mixed personal money and business money directly, but as the co-owner of the business with his wife, and last I knew they were the only owners but I’m not actually certain about that, they could have allowed for the company to keep a better safety net and reduced their own take-home as owners even while keeping their compensation as CEO and CFO. Instead, they made a lot of large purchases, I’m not sure which allocation they took this stuff from because a lot of it was their own but a lot of it also became content for the channel so I have no idea if it was personal or company money they spent, while claiming that the company was in a debt that would take years to see any return on much less profit. It seemed a little tone-deaf to be moving from a small mansion to a “real” mansion while also complaining that the company they owned and at the time were CEO and CFO of was taking on dangerous levels of debt.
Now, I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have a salary or that he shouldn’t be able to spend his own money. But he’s talked before about how his finances and the company’s profits are closely linked as the owner of LMG. He has said, “Any extra profit that we have as a company goes in my pocket,” when trying to explain how he thought stepping down as CEO and hiring someone else would create less incentive to run the company for maximum profitability. That has… It’s own problems that tie in with his wanting to keep employees hourly and not salary and a bunch of other things, but none of that was my point or the point of this comment. The truth is that we don’t know how he runs his business in great detail or how the financials are handled. But at the very least, it was not a good look even at the time before this most recent controversy.
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I felt that whole series was so out of touch and so cringy, oh my…
I’ve been wondering about that too; really not sure where the ROI was going to come from for such a massive investment. Sure, it enhances the videos, but by that much? Unlikely. Where’s the income generation happening on all that equipment?
They have the infrastructure to be a testing powerhouse, putting out a lot more data than other sites. That said, they seem to be doing it very inefficiently and don’t seem to have the staff and knowledge to make it all work.
All the videos on the equipment. :p
I mostly think this is the main thing about the lab. It’s content, lots of content, which he can monetize. His giant house. Lots of projects, more content.
The data is a far secondary goal. The equipment would never pay for itself without the content it generates.
The dude who doesn’t let his employees talk about pay is a shit bag? Who would have guessed?
While calling himself a socialist and virtue signalling about it on twitter, to boot.
Not an LMG fan but I assumed better of them in this regard, wow.
It gets worse
Madison (a former LMG employee) took to Twitter to unload her experience of widespread sexual harassment, bullying, intimidation and other issues. She’s just thrown a whole tanker of gasoline on the fire.
https://twitter.com/suuuoppp/status/1691693740254228741
Linus is about to end up homeless…
Wow, this summary is scathing
Oh. I liked her on the videos. Explains why havent seen her anymore. This is pretty sad to read.
This is a pretty bad look. I think maybe someone head is too far up where it shouldn’t be to get that.
He’s an entertainer, but also an idiot
I can only hope for any kind of positive outcome.
I can only hope for
any kind of positive outcomea t-shirt for sale at lttstore.com at 25% off that makes light of the situation.Feels more fitting.
It’s about time that this misinformation spreading bozo is stopped. That whole channel is a joke & I never understood why people watch this shit. And the reaction is not surprising.
i’m getting somewhat sick of seeing this posted everywhere…
This is a separate follow up, but I get what you mean
Yep
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