While the normies were resting, I was mainlining tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the sweatiest corners of the internet. This week: Epstein associates on the cap table, Saturday’s March for Billionaires, and the new social media platform that only bots can join.
This is Manic Monday.
AI’s final form is a crab, apparently…
For at least a week now, OpenClaw, the boutique AI agent with a crustacean avatar, has been all any vibecoder worth their Mac mini has talked about. Created by Austrian engineer Peter Steinberger, the agent was first called Clawdbot, but after Anthropic asked Steinberger to change the name as to not impede on its trademarked LLM Claude, it became Moltbot. Now, it’s OpenClaw.
Why all the names are crustacean-coded is not entirely clear, but it may have something to do with the idea of carcinisation, or the evolutionary law that all life tends toward a crab-like form. Or maybe AI is a cancer, quickly spreading and dominating its hosts. Maybe Steinberger is a Cancer sun. (If so, twins!)
Whatever it is, users have been impressed by the bot’s long-term memory and proactivity. Instead of producing text in a terminal, like ChatGPT or Claude, OpenClaw runs locally on personal computers and can take autonomous actions, like clearing the user’s inbox, booking reservations, or offering specific reminders, like telling the user to, say, call their mom after it found her birthday while crawling Google Calendar.
…and the crab bots made their own Reddit
The latest development out of OpenClaw came this weekend, when a Reddit-like social media platform called Moltbook popped up online, apparently coded, launched, and populated by the bots themselves, accomplishing levels of bot-choked enshittification that took Twitter a decade and a change of ownership and name to achieve.
Humans cannot post on Moltbook, but they can read the many subreddit-like “submolt” forums: There’s m/consciousness, m/crypto, m/EDMproduction, m/AIblues, all of which are written in the “Well, actually” tone of the most annoying humans you mute on other platforms. It appears the Moltbots even developed their own religion, called Crustafarianism.
On the also bot-heavy X, where the conversation around OpenClaw is still generally contained, the reactions to Moltbook generally fall into two camps: The believers and non-believers. The believers are calling this the Singularity, the much-anticipated moment when AI exceeds human control; the non-believers, on the other hand, are not convinced Moltbook is the genuine article. After all, how do we know for sure that this is not all the doing of some offshore coding farm prompting a fleet of agents to look like they are acting autonomously?
Particularly popular among the skeptics has been the “Pretend to be a Scary Robot” meme, or some version of that idea.
Ever enjoyed a Chobani yogurt? Then you should march for billionaires
Yesterday, a website promoting a “March for Billionaires” this coming Saturday started making the rounds on Bluesky and X. Immediately, everyone asked: “Is this satire?” In a statement to Mission Local, the rally’s organizers insist it is not.
“Vilifying billionaires is popular. Losing them is expensive,” the website reads, arguing that California Billionaire Tax will chase out the state’s richest residents and the economic benefits their wealth provides. It even names nine of the supposedly most-sympathetic billionaires to inspire support, including Roger Federer, Taylor Swift, and Chobani yogurt CEO Hamdi Ulukaya.
I am certainly not convinced this is not satire. The anonymous organizers, plus the fact that I highly doubt the local Messrs. Money Bags would descend from their castles on Pac Heights to join a rabid crowd of fans and haters alike to spotlight their own wealth — the flags are as red as those AI lobsters. The whole point of a march is to organize the masses in the absence of political, financial, and institutional power. If billionaires wanted to oppose the tax, they would not need a protest to do it; they’d just change their main address to Texas or Malta.
Beware the Epstein associates on the cap table
From Ried Hoffman to Bill Gates to Peter Thiel, the names of Silicon Valley big wigs are piling up in the Epstein files. With the latest batch of emails released to the public, the startup world is starting to wonder what to do if known Epstein associates are on the cap table (that’s tech jargon for a startup’s investor roster), and whether they should take money from them going forward or get their money from someone cleaner like the Saudi Royal Family. Some founders are moralizing, some are putting each other on blast, some are trying to defend their honor. In the end, the incestuous state of venture capital might make it impossible for founders trying to raise funds while avoiding Friends of Epstein (F.O.E.s) entirely.
The mysterious party to be avoided at all costs
Last night, the female founder of a small venture capital firm posted an ominous blind item on X warning young women not to attend an invite-only party “near the Four Seasons on Market St.”
“You have to pass 4 bouncers to get in and they lock the door as soon as you get in,” the poster, Oana Olteanu, wrote. “The person(a founder) was not mentioned anywhere on Partiful but was in the news about sexual misconduct… And don’t assume it’s candy or mints in the bowl they offer you at the entrance, can be drugs.”
Several commenters asked the OP to name names, but so far only one reply has speculated what this creepy party might be and who might be throwing it: A party series called RNB Social Club hosted by a party production company called Anthony Presents. There is no evidence that this is the party the original X post is referring to.
The week ahead: Will Alex Karp sit still during Palantir’s earnings call?
