It’s because Linus still has startup brain. He was squeezing blood from the stone for the first few years and his success then makes him believe that he needs to maintain that same mentality now.
Fortunately, he’s also realized that he doesn’t like running a large company and he’s hired a CEO. Unfortunately, said CEO is still stuck in his previous role and won’t actually be starting full-time for another few months. So now the company gets to sit in an awkward limbo of Linus checking out but Tarren not being ready to take over.
Once he is able to be a real CEO of LMG, I’m willing to bet things will start to dramatically change. Tarren has been running businesses as businesses for a while now and thus should know how to shape the company. He’ll be able to adjust the goals and fix the spends to align with those goals. Since the company is privately owned, as long as Linus doesn’t step on the process, it should go pretty well.
Linus is surrounded by people who can call him on his bullshit. Luke is very aware of the shit Linus steps in and lets him know. Linus just kinda sucks at publicly admitting it, at least not without getting his own jab in. Hence taking over the “Trust Me Bro” joke.
Linus takes all criticism on LMG as a personal attack regardless of his involvement. Hopefully, once Tarren steps in, he’ll be able to wrangle Linus and just let LMG handle the public relations side.