There's a big part of this that's just his ego though. The self-imposed release schedule is bad, but ultimately his inability to truly admit he was wrong is what will ultimately undo the company.

I was enthusiastic about LTT Labs - there are many areas that reviewers can't explore because of the complicated and expensive testing setups required, such as objective measurements on whether a phone has a good antenna or not. But at this point I'm not sure how we would ever be able to trust what they produce.

That's my big worry. The company is now too big and too expensive to slow down. There's a real possibility that this mess results in mass layoffs at LMG, either because public backlash kills their profitability or they accept how screwed up they are and slow down and take some time to fix things and this results in a drop in output that means they can no longer afford their current scale. I don't know how much runway they have. And in that scenario it's the most vulnerable employees and not the problem-people in leadership who'd be facing the music, which is awful.

The Billet Labs incident crossed the line. That's not something you can just apologize or pay your way out of.

In his forum post he commented somewhere in the thread that billet sent them a quote and they paid in full - so at least that part should be resolved. Still a massive fuckup though.

Are there such thing as non-profit driven review channels?

LTT marketing themselves as a Canadian company/channel but using only US prices and availability was always a red flag for me.

Didn't he even make a video where he talked about he wants to stop pushing expensive shit to people, but then he didn't because he's just a money hungry twat? I never got the appeal and found him beyond annoying. So this is just great bews, maybe his videos will stop showing up everywhere.

Mkbhd gets paid for nearly everything on his channel but he also doesn't tell you to go out and buy or not buy shit based on lies

Every large channel, and most small channels that aren't explicitly charities, are profit-driven. I'd actually say being visibly profit-driven is usually a good sign because it means you know where their money comes from. What's worse is when you don't know who's funding them -- that's when you get paid misinformation peddlers.

Media is a business. If you're not their paying customer, you're the product. That's why stuff like Patreon and LTT's paid merch is a good thing.

The real problems are that the company runs in an extremely, dangerously unprofessional way - well beyond normal startup mayhem. Combine that with the break-neck pace they try to put out content, and the fact that Linus himself has an ego the size of Cleveland, and it means that they're a danger to themselves and others. And Linus taking every problem personally means the company can't change properly. He needs to take a leave of absence and bring in some dispassionate experts fix things at his company, and when he comes back he's just another employee who does things by the book and lets the CEO run things under the new model until he learns the ropes.

But I worry that the company is screwed regardless - they might not be able to come back from this, and even if they can the loss of revenue might exceed their operating costs and runway. For Linus himself and the rest of the leadership? Good. That's appropriate comeuppance. But it's a big group, and that will probably mean layoffs, and I feel bad for the people at the bottom who'll be hit by the shit rolling downhill.

I'm not sure I would go that far. I largely agree with the GN video, but I would not call Linus a piece of shit. There are a number of things I disagree with Linus about on a fundamental level, but he is still just a slightly awkward nerd with methed up squirrel energy at the end of the day. As Steve notes in the video he is basically responsible for the livelihood of 120 people, I'm sure that puts a little bit of stress on a person. That being said it doesn't absolve him of what has been happening, and his current path seems deeply misguided.