Linus Sebastian is a YouTube tech guru that rose to prominence in the last few years with his channel, Linus Tech Tips, and has created something of an enterprise around his content called Linus Media Group
More recently his work has become somewhat...sloppy, with errors here and there, recommended practices ignored on the odd occasion, but nothing so big as to cause anyone major damage. Linus has a default PR mode for when these issues come about, and it usually worked...
Until last month.
Last month, Linus reviewed a prototype of an all new type of water-cooling block (basically a replacement for a fan that can be way more efficient) for GPUs. This block was expensive, and expensive to make, but by all reasonable measures, has a very good cooling impact to show for it. It was made by a startup firm of two people, and they sent Linus a prototype with a supported GPU.
The GPU ended up disappearing into the aether, and Linus opted to use an unsupported GPU to test the cooling block, which resulted in inferior cooling performance. Linus ended up trashing the block in his review.
He then went and auctioned off the prototype without the knowledge of the manufacturer, only offering to make them whole once it had already been auctioned off.
Linus tried to deal with it in his usual PR way, once Gamers Nexus started reporting on the goings on. But these weren't small errors, these were the mother of all PC tech journalistic fuckups, and he refused to acknowledge them as such. That is not only enough to get someone immediately fired, it's enough to get them industry-blacklisted.
It's gotten so bad that the CEO and CFO of Linus Media Group have come out directly and thrown Linus under the bus for his fuckery.
And that's before we come on to the topic of this post, the SA allegations...
Edit: minor name corrections.