The sad/tragic thing is he probably doesn't realize that and he is surrounded by people who reinforce that. He never had any business running a company this size.

I mean if he straight up said 500$ what other excuse is there?

On his initial (bad) response he says that it's because the outcome wouldn't be affected because the product is "bad". But no way in hell Linus is THAT stupid, ie to think that a 3090TI block would work the same on a 4090.

I mean since he has the lab and all he could have just sent it to them to verify if the cooler makes good contact with the dye and other chips on the 4090 and verified it with billet like how they'd compare CPU scores with AMD.

But all of that takes drumroll time (and therefore money) and money!