Linus Tech Tips i la crisi de confiança: errors, Billet Labs, Honey i el jet privat

At its peak, Lionus TechTips was pulling nearly 28 million subscribers across 10 channels and was worth over $100 million. However, the channel was also one of the biggest promoters of a huge influencer scam and recently got into a controversy where the owner Lionus bought a private jet while employees were slaving away. My name's Ryan and we're going to look at how Lionus TechTips's company and reputation is going downhill as well as give an update as to where his company stands now. To understand how far Lionus fell, you first have to understand what he actually built. Back in November 2008, Lionus Sebastian started the Lionus Tech Tips channel out of a spare bedroom in Canada with his first video being about an undisclosed AMD processor. Thank you for joining me. That didn't quite go as smoothly as I His first videos were simple with no production crew or a big budget. Just a guy who was genuinely obsessed with tech and wanted to share that with people and people loved it with comments like unedited reviews rock. Always enjoy these. And I love Lina's tech tips. They aren't boring like everything else. They're short and straight to the point. As a result, the channel grew from a bedroom setup into a 100 person company with 10 channels across the platform. By its peak, LTT was one of YouTube's biggest and most influential tech channels. In 2023, he revealed that his company got a huge buyout offer. We did have a substantial offer recently to sell out, and I might as well speak plainly. The offer was 100 million. And of course, he declined. That's how big things were. But the bigger you get, the more people are watching when you mess up. And Lionus was about to give them plenty. In August 2022, LTT launched a premium tech backpack through their merchandise store, which sold for $250. But when customers started asking about the warranty policy for such an expensive product, Lionus basically told them this. them this. them this. We are not formalizing anything, but we will stand behind our products. Um, I think that we have a pretty good good good track. track. track. I think we have a pretty good track record for just kind of dealing with it. His answer instantly triggered a wave of backlash from viewers on the internet with people saying things like, "LTT has always discussed warranties from a consumer standpoint and has constantly called out companies for not honoring warranties or having bad warranties for the products they review. But now that

it's a product coming from LTT, warranties don't matter. What a weird hill to die on from the LTT crew. Shows how out of touch Lionus has become. If a hardware manufacturer had said warranties don't matter, so we don't need to offer one, he would be all over them. And the hypocrisy is almost palpable. I can't wait for Nvidia, Intel, and other tech companies to adopt the Trust Me Bro warranty. truly setting a wonderful example to those LT apparently tries to hold responsible on how to treat consumers. Even people who had already bought the backpack got to question their decision after hearing Lionus' take on warranty like one user on X with this following tweet. The LTT store backpack is expensive, a premium product. I purchased one, but after hearing what Linus Sebastian had to say about not providing a written concrete warranty, I think I need to cancel my order. The fact that you won't even provide a basic warranty, something legally mandated in much of the first world, something that comes with the most basic products, let alone a $250 backpack, is very concerning and immensely anti-consumer. And in response to those angry tweets, Lionus replied with, "It's likely we will formalize some kind of warranty policy before we actually start shipping. We have been talking about it for months and weighing our options, but it will need to be bulletproof." My point is that lifetime warranty or any warranty period means nothing. I could just fold the company and you'd be out of luck. So, at the end of the day, you either trust me to do the right thing or you don't. It doesn't actually make a difference if we have a formal warranty policy. Eventually, he added a formal written warranty, but at the same time, he didn't forget to take advantage of all the negative attention on his brand by selling a Trust Me Bro warranty t-shirt, essentially mocking the people raising concerns. Although this was a small controversy, the way he handled the criticism and walked it back only after enough pressure did not sit well with people. But it was also the first time you could see the pattern clearly. dismiss the criticism, wait until the pressure is too big to ignore, then fix it quietly without ever admitting you were wrong. And that pattern was about to get a lot harder to ignore. On July 29th and 30th of 2023, Lionus created a community-driven expo for PC hardware and gaming enthusiasts called LTX 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. And on the first day of the event, the channel Murfs

Gaming got a chance to visit the LTT studio and Labs. And during the tour, a lab employee proudly spoke about the testing process in LTT's team. The difference between us and somebody like Gamers Nexus or Hardware Unbox is we test new components, new tests every time. time. time. But little did he know, he was about to start a huge war between the biggest tech channels on the internet. 5 days after the LTT Labs claim, Hardware Unboxed another text channel with over 1.1 million subscribers was the first one to fire back, saying, "LTT Labs taking shots. I've rerun more benchmarks and Lionus has spent money on testing equipment and staff. If you have to tell everyone how good your testing is in my 20 plus years of experience, that generally means your testing isn't very good. Your work speaks for itself, guys. That's how you build credibility. However, this was nothing compared to what Gamers Nexus, a PC hardware reviews channel with over 2.6 million subscribers, got to say about LT. In a 40inute video titled The Problem with Lionus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, and Responsibility, Gamers Nexus host Steve Burke exposed a couple of serious problems from the LDT team with the first one about the very thing LT Lab is proud of, their testing data. And now, even with its heavily marketed debut of Labs, LMG is still consistently making errors in nearly every single review that they publish. It is okay to make errors. All of us do this in this line of work, but the concern we have is that these types of errors are in nearly every single LT technical or review type of video. So, there are enough errors that we can't fit them all into a normal length. length. length. Steve then pointed out the concerns he had about the authenticity of Lionus's review. review. review. $200,000 into Laptop Maker Framework and yet is also covering their product uh and their competitor's products. LMG also has a crossbranded against screwdriver with Noctua on their store while they're also reviewing Noctua products favorably even when it's shown to be hitting by their own data 100° C. But the case that really set people off was about one particular product testing. On June 25th, 2023, LTT released a video reviewing a copper water cooler from Billet Labs, which is a tiny startup. T team stuck this special 3090 Ti water block on an RTX 4090. 4090. 4090. If this wasn't a 3090 Ti, then we don't have another 3090 Ti that we can take apart. apart. apart. How the hell did we not know what GPU this thing was? I thought it was a 3090 Ti. So, we just casually had a 4090 sitting on the shelf clearly labeled stating that it should work despite it not being explicitly compatible. However, it didn't stop LT from trying. Pri and continued with the video despite misrepresenting the product. massively by using it on an incompatible device

that it literally would not fit properly. LT's presentation goes down the path of being irresponsible, presenting the product as much more difficult to work with than it would be if used properly. And based on that flawed testing, his conclusion about the product was the following. following. following. But it's a bad product. It looks great. Yeah, it looks super cool. Are you just saying it's bad just purely because of the price? It's bad because it makes absolutely no sense and nobody should buy it. To Steve, this kind of behavior is highly damaging. highly damaging. highly damaging. Harms a small company and this kind of behavior can kill someone's life work in a heartbeat and it'd be based on invalid testing and presentation. One of the company company company and even the founder of Billet Labs had to clear the confusion in the video's comment section saying Felix from Billet Labs here. Great video, guys. But this block was specifically for a 3090Ti, not a 4090. We've since obtained a 4090 to test with, and using it with the 3090Ti block leaves a gap of around 1 mm over the die, so it's never going to cool properly. We're happy to answer any questions in the comments below. We love LTT, but it was difficult to watch their criticisms when pretty much every design issue that Lionus raised was done for a reason, which was all explained to Adam weeks ago, none of which, I guess, was fed back to Lionus. We also sent a full instruction manual that seemingly wasn't used. Despite that, Lionus doubled down on his opinion and didn't even show a shred of guilt for essentially destroying the product. I don't know, guys. I'm not sure if I can apologize for not spending another 100,200 100,200 100,200 300 $500 of various people's time sitting and engineering a workaround to a product that no matter the result nobody should buy. But it didn't stop there. Things got even messier when Steve exposed the LTT team trying to take advantage of Billet Labs financially. Labs financially. Labs financially. Gamers Nexus learned that the company asked for the prototype back on June 28th. This would allow them to send it out to other media or use it for further development. Lionus Media Group agreed at least twice to return the product. The first time they agreed to send it back was June 30th at LTX. Lionus Media Group put the one-of-a-kind water block up for auction at its Extra Life auction event without the permission of Billet Labs. Billet did not learn of this on and this immediately triggered another wave of hatred towards Lionus and his team with comments saying, "How can you mistreat a company like that?" Literally auctioned off their best prototype. It

breaks my heart how they mistreated Billet Labs, a public apology is in place. Just hours after Gamers Nexus uploaded their video, Lionus took to the company's forum to respond with a rather lengthy post. In it, he addressed his controversy with Billet Lab's prototype, saying, "We didn't sell the monolock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication and the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype. Nevertheless, the truth was much more complicated." Billet Labs then posted their public statement on Reddit about the incident, saying, "Regarding LT, we are simply going to state the relevant facts." On the 10th of August, we were told by LTT via email that the block had been sold at auction. There was no apology. We replied on 10th August within 30 minutes telling LTT that this wasn't okay and that this was a prototype worth x amount of pounds. And we asked if they plan to reimburse us at all. We received no reply and no offer of payment until 2 hours after the Gamers Nexus video went live on the 14th of August, at which point Lionus himself emailed us directly. The exact monetary value of the prototype was offered as a reimbursement. We have not received nor have we asked for any other form of compensation. At this point, it seemed like nobody wanted to trust Lionus anymore. with comments like, "It looks like LTT would have just ignored them without the backlash." And Lionus was 100% going to sweep this under the rug. They knew Billet had zero pull until another YouTube giant came out. But Steve from Gamers Nexus wasn't done yet, as he brought up another example of bad review from the Short Circuit team. This time it was about a gaming mouse. This is not a smooth mouse, and that's really disappointing. Uh especially on like a premium gaming mouse. that should be one of the primary focuses. Pwnage then contacted LMG to notify them that LMG had not removed the protective film from the feet of the mouse. However, the short circuit team denied it at first as Lionus admitted it during a later video saying that our initial correction which was posted said hey no it you know is high friction and we did test it and there were no films on which resulted in this conclusion. conclusion. conclusion. The only question that remains is, am I recommending you buy this product? Due to the strong criticism from the video, it prompted a rather aggressive response from the Pwnage team, saying, "Our mouse was given as a prize to each of their VIP whales to their recent Lionus Expo event, but say not recommended. Talk to your boss at Lionus Tech before you mess up his credibility as well." For a channel this big, you have a responsibility to do basic study and not spread misinformation. spread misinformation. spread misinformation. But it wasn't just the Ponchinage team. Viewers also expressed their disappointment with people commenting things like, "Most, if not all, premium

mice come with a protective film on the feet." The fact that this professional mouse reviewer didn't even check for them is appalling. or even threw in some sarcastic joke into the mix with, "Hey guys, maybe grab a prototype from them and sell it at auction, too." That'd show them. And as the backlash getting more intense, the short circuit team eventually had to back down, admitting, "We watched through all the raw footage from this shoot. And it does appear that the protective plastic film was indeed still on the feet when David gave his initial impressions of the glide field. We've cut out the section of the video regarding the glide issues so as to not misrepresent the mouse. We deeply regret allowing this error to happen and will be implementing process changes so similar issues are avoided in the future. Importantly, we apologize for getting it wrong in the video and we apologize for how we handle the communications that follow. Even Lionus himself had to address this incident on a podcast a podcast a podcast and we did test it and there were no films on the feet and we didn't do our due diligence to figure this out. I am extremely frustrated for a number of reasons by this. Um so I just want to say hey massive apology to onage then went on and unlisted the video. But that wasn't all. Lionus TechTips even released a 20inut YouTube apology video in which several high-ranking employees and executives promised to do better. Effective immediately, all YouTube video production is on pause and our teams are going to be spending this entire next week focusing on long-term workflow changes to make our content better in a lasting way. This means for the first time in over 12 years, LT will be missing not just one daily upload, but many. While Lionus personally apologized for everything, for everything, for everything, whatever is being said about me and whatever is being said about the team should never have allowed my feelings to distract from any valid criticism of our work. My decision, for example, to not bother retesting the monolock, that was obviously wrong, and my lame response on the forum was a huge and unnecessary blunder. I owe you guys better, and better, and better, and I'm sorry. However, that was only half of what August threw at LT. The very next day, a former employee named Madison Reev posted a detailed thread about some of the reasons she left the company. Among those reasons were serious allegations of what was going on inside the company. In her tweets, Madison said, "I was consistently belittled by certain members of upper management. My work was called dog

I was called incompetent. When I would reach out to managers and try to get help with these situations, I would be told to put on my big girl pants and be more assertive. I was told I was bossy when I was trying to be assertive like I was asked to do. I was told I was arguing when I was trying to discuss my point of view. I was told to calm my tits, stop being such a b and other comments to similar effect. And it didn't get any better with the working environment. As Madison continued, work from home was a whole issue. If you took 3 minutes to answer a personal email, you could get in trouble. There is a system of micromanaging and a level of distrust because the amount of content they have to push out daily is so insane. I purposefully cut my leg open so badly I would have to go to the ER to get it stapled back together. It was genuinely the only way in my mind to take a day off without being harassed for a reason why. I'd spoken to managers about how I was struggling and how the workload was too much for one person, but I was belittled and told you just have bad time managed skills. And even worse, she was also harassed by other employees who at one point asked her to twerk during work hours and was questioned about her sexual history. Hearing all of these, fans were pissed off beyond belief with comments saying, "I am beyond disgusted to learn about all of this. I had unsubed to all their channels an hour ago over the journalistic integrity issues, but learning this leaves me speechless. I hope you're doing better, Madison, and thank you for bringing this to light. And when people commented on Lionus to address the allegations on his apology video, many of these Madison related comments were deleted. Before everything went out of control, the LTT team released a press statement saying, "We are taking Madison's allegations seriously. We are conducting an internal assessment alongside bringing in a third-party investigator to look into the allegation. We are committed to publishing the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise due to this. But the damage had already been done as the Lionus TechTips channel lost 200,000 followers just in August 2023 alone. The pattern from the backpack controversy had just played out again. He only moved on when the pressure became impossible to ignore, and this time it was on a much bigger stage. If the 2023 crisis raised questions about LTT's accuracy in workplace culture, it was pale in comparison to what happened in December 2024. On December 22nd, 2024, a YouTuber

named Megalag published a video titled Exposing the Honey influencer scam. For those who didn't know, Hana is a free Chrome extension that automatically searches for coupons on over 30,000 sites across the globe, which helps users save time and money while shopping online. The video revealed that Honey had been secretly stealing money from the very creators who had promoted them via affiliated marketing. In order to understand how that all works, you need to know that when you click an affiliate link and buy something, the influencer who promoted that product earns a commission for referring you to that store. And behind all of that is a complex mechanism operating quietly. Let's say you're looking for a CPU and after watching a Lionus video, you decided to buy the one he recommended in that video. And this is what happened next. You see, after clicking Lionus' affiliate link, you'll notice in the URL, there's a tracking tag labeled Short Circuit. That's a reference to one of Lionus' YouTube channels. And this tracking tag is how Newegg knows who to pay a commission to. We can also see that this tracking tag has been saved on my browser in the form of a cookie that will expire in 30 days. Then, when you were at the checkout page, this took place. Well, once Honey popped up, watch what happened to Lionus' affiliate cookie after we clicked apply discounts. You see that? Honey came in, removed Lionus' affiliate cookie, and replaced it with their own, claiming credit for the sale and pocketing the commission money for themselves. It didn't take long for that video to blow up, pulling in nearly 19 million views to this day. And LTT was right at the center of it. Lionus TechTips, who have been promoting Honey since 2017. Turns out that back in 2020, someone had already brought the problem up on the LT forum, saying, "Word on the street is that Honey takes affiliate money. Is that a fact? Any chance LTT will look into that?" And when another user replied with, "I failed to see how this is a problem," he asked, "What about all the affiliates losing money because of Honey and the users that don't realize who is getting screwed for Honey to make money? Am I crazy for thinking Lionus is a crook for this? Only to receive this answer. Yes, you are the one who's in the wrong here. There's literally nothing cru or shady about Honey's business model. Eventually, the topic was ignored until 2022 when another user noticed that Lionus was no longer promoting Honey and asked the team about it, which one of Lionus' employees responded with, "We ended the partnership with Honey due to the way their service interacted with affiliate links. Essentially, if someone clicked on an affiliate link, for example, one of ours below in the video description on YouTube, and then if they say, "Use Honey and search for a deal," Honey will override that tracking link even if they don't find you a deal. But the worst thing is, although the LT team knew about this, they did nothing to stop Honey from taking advantage of other creators, especially since they were one of the biggest promoters of this scam. They did approximately 160

sponsored segments, all of which remain live on YouTube. Those videos have accumulated around 194 million views. According to my data, that makes Lionus' company LMG the third largest promoter of Honey on YouTube. So yeah, in my opinion, they should have made more noise about this. And when asked why he didn't warn people, his answer was this. If I told everybody uninstall Honey, an extension that supposedly gets them a better deal because I wasn't making enough money from it. Do you really honestly ask yourself truly think that would have gone good for me? for me? for me? And this left a bad taste in many people's mouths, including Louis Rossman, who immediately called out Lionus's response to the scandal. Elinus is asking his viewers to ask if they think it would have gone well for him. And my first thing, what makes me want to punch my monitor is that it's not about you. You gave up the right for it to be about you or your image or how you think you'd be perceived when you took their money to advertise a closed source browser extension to all of your users. And it wasn't cheap to advertise on Lionus' channel. As Louis showed, it could be anywhere from $7,000 for a mid-roll ad to a $63,000 sponsored video. And all of this brought another huge wave of backlash toward Lionus with comments saying LTT were one of the biggest victims but made the least noise. I think that's what's bothering people. Genuine tech tip would have been to uninstall Honey. Lionus is the same guy who says using an ad block is piracy because it hurts creators. But an extension that literally steals your affiliate money. It's not a big deal and not his story to tell. Since this controversy, the Lionus TechTips channel's viewership has also dropped sharply up to 50% in September 2025. And even Lionus himself acknowledged on a podcast through a video titled, "Our views are down," that the decline in viewership might be the result of his past controversy. Um, you know, part of the tech community that is just completely completely completely tuned out at this point in a like we can never reach them again. Yeah. Way. And and I'll be honest with you, you know, I don't really know how to deal with it, right? It it doesn't matter what the intent was. It doesn't matter what our actions have been. It just it just matters what, you know, some snake put out to a very large number of people to poison their opinion, right? opinion, right? opinion, right? But while his channel was bleeding viewers, Lionus was busy making a very different kind of decision. One that was going to put Lionus back into the

spotlight, but not for the reasons he expected. On April 2nd, 2026, Lionus posted a video titled, "The Gamer Jet is real and it costs $0," showcasing his newest purchase. And the way he began the video, immediately baffled everyone. So, the April Fools wasn't a joke. We actually bought a jet. What started as a meme on WAN show when I discovered that a jet propelled aircraft is not as expensive as I initially thought. when I started to explore that one aircraft that I was like this is shockingly affordable because just a few years earlier on the WAN show Lionus had a completely different thought on private jets. I I kind of look at private air travel and I'm like um yeah it doesn't seem great you know the the the sheer amount of fuel consumption. So so I have my own thoughts on private travel. I don't feel it's necessary for me in any kind of security way and and I'm not I'm not super keen on it. I don't think it's great. great. great. So, when Lionus got asked about the price, his answer was even more unreal. So, because of the non-disclosure agreement that we signed in order to purchase it, like this whole world is very closed door. I can't actually tell you how much I paid, paid, paid, but what I can tell you is that if you Google it, it's less than that. And the second thing that I can tell you is that with a little bit of uh girl math, $0. But he got even more excited when it came to the fuel cost of flying to Mexico and back to Canada. When we factor in that the fuel coming back from Mexico was half as much as we paid to go down. Oh wo. It actually cost less than buying like a first class ticket for everyone, which was kind of mind-blowing. However, the internet did not find this convincing. News outlets started calling him completely out of touch while many viewers started expressing their disdain with comments saying his poor employee having to stand there and listen to his boss brag about how rich he is. This was the most husband trying to rationalize his expensive purchase to his wife conversation I've ever seen between two straight men. On the LTT subreddit, people were criticizing Lionus' decisions left and right to the point that he even got the moderators to delete a bunch of negative comments about the jet. And on YouTube, his name became a hot topic for creators with videos like the Lionus TechTip situation is bad, which got over 1 million views in just over 3 weeks, and internet versus Lionus Tech Tips, which got nearly 40,000 views under 2 weeks. So, it's safe to say after all of these controversies that Lionus' company reputation has been on a downfall. If you enjoyed this video, you'll probably like these next ones as well. And don't forget to subscribe.