Linus Media Group



Linus Media Group Inc. (LMG) is a privately held Canadian digital media entertainment company with a focus on technology, founded by Linus Sebastian and Yvonne Ho in 2012. The company owns and operates several technology-oriented YouTube channels and podcasts, most popularly Linus Tech Tips (LTT), serving as their production agency and distributor.

LMG's other channels, including Techquickie, TechLinked, ShortCircuit, and GameLinked have earned a total of 19 million subscribers and 7 billion video views between them.

After serving as the CEO of Linus Media Group for 10 years, Sebastian retired from this position effective July 1, 2023, replaced by Terren Tong. Sebastian and his wife, Yvonne Ho, remain the sole shareholders in the company, and Sebastian became Chief Vision Officer.

History
British Columbia native Linus Sebastian and several others launched Linus Media Group in January 2013 out of a garage, while the company was incorporated in October 2012. Previously Sebastian worked for the now-defunct Canadian online computer retailer NCIX and later on served as a host for the retailer's online video content. Due to high costs and low viewership during the early days of the channel, Sebastian was instructed to create the Linus Tech Tips channel as a cheaper offshoot of the NCIX channel, to allow for lower production values without affecting the NCIX brand. He described TigerDirect and Newegg as competitors. Linus Tech Tips was created on November 24, 2008. He eventually left NCIX following a dispute regarding company management, negotiating an agreement in which he could keep the channel as long as he signed a non-compete clause. Within two years of its establishment, in 2014, Tubefilter named Linus Tech Tips as being within the "top 1% of Google's preferred advertising channels" on YouTube for the technology category.

Currently, LMG is headquartered in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. it has over 100 full-time employees.

The company has several subsidiaries:

In 2022, Sebastian announced the creation of LTT Labs, a division dedicated to testing the validity of manufacturer claims.

On May 18, 2023, Sebastian announced that he would be stepping down as Chief Executive Officer and would be transitioning into a creative role, effective July 1, 2023. Terren Tong, previously an executive of Corsair Gaming and whom Sebastian worked under during his time at NCIX, was named to replace Sebastian as CEO. In the announcement, Sebastian mentioned he had received a buyout offer for the company from an unnamed entity, valuing it at around $100 million. Sebastian declined the offer.

March 2023 hack
On March 23, 2023, Linus Tech Tips, TechLinked, and Techquickie were hacked and subsequently terminated due to a security breach. The hackers changed the channel names, changing the main channel name to Tesla and started broadcasting two identical live streams which appeared to show deepfakes of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and others having a conversation about Ethereum, GPT-4, and other topics. The hackers also unlisted many videos and later re-published them as well as uploaded videos with titles that stated "DONOTUPLOAD" and subsequently changed the name to LinusTechTipsTemp to seem more legitimate. Sometime before 11:51 am UTC, all hacked channels were terminated, although it is unclear if it was by the hackers or by YouTube. Around 3 pm UTC, Sebastian published a message on Floatplane, saying that he had everything "locked down" and that he is working with Google to get everything reinstated. At approximately 3 am UTC, all hacked channels were reinstated, with most unauthorized changes reverted some time later. A video was later published on the Linus Tech Tips channel about the incident explaining that an employee had downloaded a Trojan horse in the guise of a PDF file from a seemingly legitimate sponsor email.

Notable videos
On January 2, 2016, Linus Tech Tips released a video demonstrating a computer capable of supporting seven individual users at once, with an estimated total cost of $30,000. The video made technology news on a number of websites.

In August 2017, the Linus Tech Tips channel uploaded a two part video where they were able to game at 16K resolution (15360 by 8640 pixels) using 16 4K monitors in a 4 by 4 configuration.

In April 2018, the Linus Tech Tips channel uploaded a video claiming that Apple refused to repair Sebastian's iMac Pro after Linus Tech Tips staff damaged it in a product teardown, a refusal that VentureBeat speculated is illegal.

In December 2018, Linus Tech Tips released a four-part series detailing their experience buying a gaming PC from 6 systems integrators representing 3 different market tiers. The series has gained over 12 million views and was covered in PC Gamer.

In 2021, Linus Tech Tips released a three-part series showing the process of making an 18-carat gold Xbox Series X controller. The first video showed the prototyping, the second the making of the gold shells, and the third the reactions of employees at their headquarters.

Allegations of misconduct by Gamers Nexus
On June 24, 2023, Linus Tech Tips uploaded a video demonstrating a prototype dual water block from Billet Labs. The video involved Linus and fellow LMG employee Adam Sondergard testing the block with a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, even though the unit had been specifically designed for the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Sondergard advised that they re-test the block using a 3090 Ti; however, Sebastian decided to publish the video of testing with the 4090, justifying this by saying that re-testing would not change the outcome of the video. Sebastian concluded that the dual design had no advantages and criticized the building experience, saying that consumers should not buy the product.

The review led to a video from Gamers Nexus, a tech YouTube channel, in which Gamers Nexus editor-in-chief Steve Burke stated that Linus Tech Tips had sold the prototype during a silent charity auction at LTX 2023 without the consent of Billet Labs. More broadly, Gamers Nexus accused Linus Tech Tips of "rushing content out the door" and tarnishing its "accuracy, ethics, and responsibility". They cited a number of videos in which Linus Tech Tips had made mistakes which in the eyes of Gamers Nexus were corrected in an insufficient manner, or not at all.

Sebastian made a written response to Gamers Nexus, saying that the company had experienced "growing pains" and would strive to increase the quality of their work in the future, but he defended not retesting the prototype with the proper graphics card as he saw that it would not improve the results and called the product an "egregious waste of money." Burke criticized this response as "unhinged" and "unapologetic." Linus Media Group later agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of the prototype.

A video featuring Sebastian, CEO Terren Tong, and CFO Yvonne Ho was later published to the Linus Tech Tips channel on August 16, 2023 apologizing for the handling of the prototype water block along with their response to the situation. In the video, Linus Media Group also announced that video production would be paused for a week while changes were made at the company. The production pause actually lasted 9 days, confirmed by Sebastian in a follow-up video. The apology video was criticized for being monetized as well as featuring jokes about sponsorships and links to the channel's store page. The video was demonetized following the criticism. The store page was also linked in the video's description, but Dexerto noted that this could have been automated by YouTube and not purposefully placed. In response to a comment on Floatplane, Linus Media Group's video sharing platform, suggesting the jokes be removed, Sebastian responded through the Linus Tech Tips account, saying that "We won't be able to make everyone perfectly happy, so what we're going to do is be ourselves—the best version of ourselves—and move past this", and asked "Is a little humor a bad thing...? Honest question".

Allegations of hostile work environment
On August 16, 2023, former Linus Media Group employee Madison Reeve, who was previously hired after appearing in a Linus Tech Tips video with Sebastian for winning a competition and left the company in late 2021, alleged within a Twitter thread of a hostile work environment while she worked at the company, including instances of assault, sexism, and other inappropriate conduct. She was reportedly scolded for taking sick days, which drove her to commit self-harm, because she saw it as "the only way in my mind to take a day off without being harassed for a reason why".

Reeve said that she did not previously make these allegations public, because she "feared even more backlash from a community that was already attacking, defaming, and sending [her] death threats", and that her experience has been "eating away at [her] for 2 years." According to Reeve, the company suffered from problems with "ego and the bottom line" and that there was an "internal paranoia" about employees leaving the company and setting up their own content creation platforms.

In an email to The Verge, Linus Sebastian said that Reeve's allegations "aren't consistent with [his] recollections", but said that Linus Media Group's human resources department would be conducting an internal review. In an additional comment, CEO Terren Tong said that along with the internal review of the allegations, the company would be hiring an outside investigator and publish its findings. The company published the outside investigator's findings in a statement in May 2024, stating the third-party investigator found the allegations of sexual harassment, bullying, abuse of power and retaliation were not substantiated. Allegations of process errors and miscommunication while onboarding Reeve were partially substantiated.