this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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Excuse me, what?
They are owned by private equity? It's pretty common these days for the more popular YT channels. Veritasium, Astrum, Fireship, fern., and Hoog are some other examples. Basically, if it's a popular YT channel, it's either owned by PE, in negotiations to be acquired by PE, or pursued by a PE firm in the hopes that they can acquire it. Private equity is accelerating their acquisitions, actually, and they want to control everything that captures the attention of viewers.
Here's a video that talks about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ-rRXWhElI
No wonder veritasium has felt "off" for me for a good while as well. A few years ago I deliberately stopped watching that channel, seems there was a deeper reason behind my superficial reasons and gut feelings
He basically only makes "why everyone except me is wrong about X" content now, and it's super smug and obnoxious.
The content is higher-quality, more like a TV production. But it's still pretty solid. Good analogies and intuitive explanations.
Do you have actual evidence for Kurzgesagt being among PE-owned channels, or are you just extrapolating? Because the video you linked doesn't mention them, and a quick search didn't turn up anything about that.
Interesting way to say "making shit up"
Didn't want to be too combative from the start lol
I don't see any evidence of that, as well.
if most of your money comes from billionaires and you admit to making propaganda videos for them, you're owned by private equity. it doesn't matter how much you or they argue about how that isn't technically true because it's not officially on paper.
Like it or not, words have meaning, and black and white thinking is comfortable, but doesn't help anyone. There is still a massive difference between the gates foundation having a 0.5% stake in Kurzgesagt and them being "owned" by PE, and pretending otherwise just means you're not actually interested in any kind of productive discussion.
When you sell your soul to the devil, it’s gone forever. And I never implied I was interested in “productive discussion”. I said what I said because I’ve seen what evidence there is and have made my own conclusions. I never said I was interested in debating.
There's an incredible amount of money in those offers. Years ago Linus Tech Tips got an offer of 100m, so I get why people take the money.
I mean, I would probably sell the channel myself. That's a lifechanging amount of money. I would buy some land deep in the backcountry, build a little walled village, and invite my family and friends to come live there. Grow our own food, set up some solar panels and wind turbines, buy up plenty of guns and ammo, and see if we couldn't hunker down and live out the ever more likely downfall of the American economy in relative peace.
A hundredth of that is a life-changing amount of money.
You had me up to "lots of guns and ammo".
Sport shooting is fun
if you wanna just have boards with rusty nails and maybe a baseball bat for defense when trump takes the mask completely off and his raving followers form pogroms to round up people who aren't loyal to him, then I will say something nice in your memory when the time comes.
You can't even say anything nice now
was I supposed to be?
What if I want only lots of guns and ammo, wiþout all þe oþer cult commune stuff? Is þat Ok?
So basically you would turn yourself in a mini-me version of Zuckenberg, Musk and Bezos. Given this consideration I would reassess my life priorities if I were you
the priority would be the lives of my friends and family. that is a priority that will not change as long as I draw breath, no matter what anyone thinks.
What are Astrum, Fireship and Hoog?
Astrum makes space stuff videos? I dunno, been a while.
Fireship makes videos about programming. Has series about "(Programming language/Framework) explained in 100 seconds", for example. I think people are complaining that the channel is slipping into AI dudebroery.
Hoog is a history/explainer type channel, I think.
Thanks for the information!
Other YouTube channels? I said that.
Yes, and also I was able to extrapolate that much, but I was looking for some idea of what kind of content they provided.
That said, I can look them up; apologies for bothering you on the matter.
oh, sorry, I misunderstood your question. Veritasium and Astrum are science channels, Fireship covers programming. fern. and Hoog do what I guess you could call deep dive videos on all sorts of topics. everything from how the North Korean king travels, to how that giant hotel aquarium broke several years ago. it's pretty random with them.
Thank you for the information.
yeah np. despite their ownership, all these channels are pretty good, just keep in mind they might sometimes have bias.
Anyone down voting this should be ashamed of themselves.
Like deeply and personally ashamed.
The type of shame that follows them for the rest their lives, because that's how scummy you'd have to be in order downvote someone shining a light on how private equity is buying out major YouTube channels.
Something that I was entirely unaware of, and appreciate your comment regarding.
Bringing this general issue up in a thread about Kurzgesagt, without also providing evidence that Kurzgesagt specifically is actually part of that issue, is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading though
I get it. They like the channel, and don't want to think that a channel they love could do something they don't love. Or maybe some of them don't see it as a bad thing in the first place.
Me, I'm the opposite. I want to know who owns the media I consume, because I want to know who might be influencing the things I see. It's always better to have the whole truth, even if that truth hurts. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy the channel still, it just means you're better prepared to understand the context of anything that that channel might say. Even cold hard facts with empirical evidence can be propaganda, depending on how it's presented.