Apparently, it was Meta that was the other main contender to hire him. Mark Zuckerberg was impressed by OpenClaw, but, I guess OpenAI wound up outbidding him. It is surprising that Anthropic and Google had little interest.
There is no excuse for corruption. However, everyone in all countries should ask themselves whether or not most of the representatives in their congress/parliament would, if investigated, be found guilty of the same sort of corruption. Power corrupts.
From the tone of your post, you might be suffering from a bit of burnout. If that's the case, then I would recommend taking any extremely low paying and low stress retail job for the rest of this year. Perhaps, when January rolls around, having had a chance to mentally decompress, you might once again consider a position in the startup world. In this job market, given your situation, you're going to have a really tough time applying for jobs at large companies while hoping to beat out all the other job applicants for that $150K+ position. If you're willing to consider taking a lower salary, I would recommend that you focus on applying for jobs at tiny startups where money is tight and the base salary they are offering is $100K or less. A lower salary means that there will be fewer job applicants that you have to beat out for the position. Right now, it might sting to take a lower salary, but, the job market might pick up in a year or two, and then it might be a lot easier to land a high paying position.
I will agree that you could say that, at $5, he's ripping people off by taking advantage of people who are desperate for even one minute of human interaction. If he priced it at $1, would he still be unethical and exploitative? Does everything have to be free? At even that price, is it still a ripoff? For me, the answer would be determined by the value of his feedback to people.