Nilay Patel

There's a part of me that just buys it, right?

You've made so much money that someone offering you even more money will have maybe no impact on your life.

But you think the leader of one company has the wrong values, so you're going to want to go work for another company that has the right values.

Or you think one company is closer to AGI and you want to be nearer to that idea.

Yeah.

How often does that come up publicly where the people leaving jobs or switching between these companies are actually saying the place I was was misaligned with my personal mission and I'm going to another place that's more closely aligned?

Is this just like writing out why I'm leaving New York, I say?

Like you're starting a sub stack and you've got to trash the New York Times on your way out the door to get attention to your sub stack.

Is it the same vibe?

Just last week, OpenAI snapped up OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger.

That's the open source AI agent framework that gave birth to Motebook.

Peter released OpenClaw in November of 2025.

It got popular last month, and now he has a job at OpenAI, probably with a hefty compensation package.

Sam Altman announced this news on X, calling Steinberger, quote, a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people, and that, quote, we expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.

Is this the pace we're at now, where you can just create a project like OpenClaw and then a couple months later, Sam Altman is saying you're a genius and paying you huge sums of money to not even acquire your project, to just hire you?

and put OpenKlana Foundation.

I do think it was fascinating that a huge part of the OpenClaw story was people buying Mac minis to run OpenClaw on because they recognized the security risks and they needed to literally put this thing on a different computer.

And then on that computer, they would log into all their accounts too.

So they would undo their own air gap that they had created by buying a Mac mini.

That feels like a big part of the overall AI story, right?