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: Nerdy escorts for AI founders, Gwyneth goes warmongering, and Sam Altman puts his skills of deception to the test.
This is Manic Monday.
Intimacy-as-a-service
It was a slow weekend for news, which means the biggest story on the feed was this Forbes feature on the “nerdy escorts” collecting $30,000 checks to spend a weekend with the AI founders most starved for touch and human attention. Apparently, these women used to work in tech and finance but pivoted to sex work after realizing it had a longer shelf life and higher earning potential than their desk jobs, since, you know, those are going to be replaced by the AI their current clients are so maniacally building. It’s a niche sector of the escort industry, the article explains, where sex is only part of the equation — clever conversation about GPUs and compute is where the real magic happens.
The article has obviously provoked some hot takes online, the most common one being that AI bros have deliberately engineered a deeply antisocial world for themselves and now have to pay through the nose for the most basic human connection, and for this they are pathetic. (Actually, not that hot of a take.) The second most common take was that the main woman featured in the article, who goes by the pseudonym Meida Marek, looks like your average gal, which I think for founders desperately seeking humanity is sort of the whole point.
And while I’m sure these women exist and do some version of what they told the reporter they do for work, the rates are questionable: Online, people are having some serious doubts about whether the numbers reported were accurate or whether they were punched up for clicks.
In other threads, some non-“nerdy” sex workers — and I’m using “nerdy” in the context of the article here — agreed that it was annoying to see the tech escorts get such a glamorous profile, and that the article did not paint an accurate picture of their daily reality. Either way, like the escorts with their awkward-ass clients, Forbes is surely dining out on the traffic.
Gwyneth goes warmongering
High Priestess of Wellness Psychosis Gwyneth Paltrow made headlines last week when she had devout Christian warmonger Trae Stephens, best known as the co-founder of defense tech firm Anduril, on the Goop podcast for a fun chat about the missiles business, spirituality, and how Paltrow’s husband lowkey thinks she’s a Republican.
This bizarre podcast pairing surprised the more naive among us (she supports vaginas! shouldn’t she be a Democrat?!), but Paltrow has been doing weird tech shit for years: Her venture capital fund Kinship invested in AI labs and crypto apps; she herself was an early investor in Oura, which is the Palantir of jewelry; she was really into NFTs in 2022. Gwyn has so much in common with Silicon Valley con men that it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she’s more than happy to cash in on how hip war has gotten recently.
So, is Paltrow a Republican? Who cares! She frankly has no need to vote at all. At the end of the day, all she needs to care about is the same thing war and wellness have in common: Money!
The girls are fightingggg
And by girls I mean prominent founders and their investors. Cloudflare co-founder Matthew Prince woke up on Saturday and decided to air some dirty VC laundry by listing three of his “worst VC stories” on X. This included one story of an ill-fated business lunch during which investor Vinod Khosla waited for Prince’s two co-founders to leave the table before whispering to Prince, “I’m impressed with you, not so much with them, what if you fire them and I’ll give you all their stock?” “Literally blocked his number,” Prince said on X. That same day, Mercor co-founder Brendan Foody also called out Sequoia Capital for deceptive business practices (which is ironic, considering how many of Foody’s former colleagues have called him out for deceptive business practices). It’s a dirty business! If you’re into this sort of gossip, Newcomer rounded up the juicy tidbits on Substack.
Just what we needed: Beige hats
And speaking of Cloudflare…
For the past few months, Cydney and I have been keeping tabs on tech companies pivoting to bad streetwear as a means to assert their “taste” and “status” as they build AI products wholly bereft of it. A source recently flagged Cloudflare’s pivot to merch: “DURABLE OBJECTS” on T-shirts and caps in various shades of beige. The items were only made available through attending a Cloudflare event last week for New York Tech Week, but based on the response on X, it is a beta test to eventually drop more AI agent-coded merch.
Durable Objects is some Cloudflare AI agent backend; why anyone would feel the need to rep this is apparently above my pay grade. But no one should: It looks so drab, like Fear of God Essentials for guys who are really concerned about how expensive AI tokens have become, or as one user put it, “computer people crave Zara.” — Joshua Bote
Sam Altman puts his lying skills to the test
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund released an episode of tech people playing Mafia. It’s like The Traitors, except instead of Pilot Pete and Bob the Drag Queen it’s Sam Altman, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, Don’t Die founder Bryan Johnson, and you know, all your favorite traitors to humanity. Right-wing commentator and Founders Fund CMO Mike Solana hosted, like a terribly dressed Alan Cumming.
The episode, which was shot in January at Tosca Cafe in North Beach, the site of the famous 2007 PayPal Mafia photo, was entertaining enough, though I personally wouldn’t watch another. If I wanted to watch tech people lie for the sake of content, I could just scroll X all weekend… oh wait, I already do that!
The week ahead: The Skinterceptor, the new blood diamond-encrusted biometric vaginal egg from Anduril x Goop, goes on sale for $499. A steal!
