alt Hacker News... Why would they pay 9 figures? It's not like Openclaw required specialized PhD-level knowledge held by <1000 people in the world to build, and that's what Meta and the other AI labs are paying ludicrous salaries for. Openclaw is a cool project and demonstrates good product design in the AI world, but by no means is a great product manager worth 1 billion dollars.
1) there is only one OpenClaw and only one Peter;
2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google
3) the top paid people in this world are not phds
4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)
5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.
need I continue?