In the recent video they did on their most profitable videos Linus explicitly said money from YouTube is only a small fraction of their revenue. I don't imagine Floatplane is much of a profit centre either...
I get it. You disagree with me. I hope you are right because he's got quite a bit of power these days.
Oh c'mon. The guy is just a YouTube celeb like hundreds of others and easily disposable, what is this "power" he wields?
If he wielded the power himself (encouraged that behavior) that's one thing, but fanbases of scale will eventually always have a subset of people that behave poorly like this despite even being directly told not to by the person they're supposedly a fan of...
I don't "disagree with you", I dismiss you. I provided an accurate description of their financials and incentives and demonstrated that your salacious claims literally don't make sense.
This is good and normal! We should always dismiss peoples feelings especially when they directly contradict all available evidence. However, I happily await your evidence demonstrating that Linus has been corrupted by a hardware partner into producing devious advertising! We'd all love for you to back your claims up.
(See?)
This mud-slinging idea you continue to push (with zero evidence) is contrary to their financials and directly contrary to their business model.
Why on earth would Linus leverage his entire business in debt to buy a huge facility to produce hardware reviews if that would mean "his sponsors" (your salacious claim) would abandon him or force him to change?
It literally doesn't make sense. If they were truly bought and paid for and producing faux-content that is actually advertising, they would have legitimately zero need to spend millions of dollars on hardware testing labs.