Sure, the whole humanoid robot thing is a scam, but at least Musk puts some effort into it.

This just lazy.

First some background.

Synapse claimed to keep customer deposits in FDIC insured bank accounts, and argued that this provided a comparable level of depositor protection to conventional bank accounts. However Synapse was not a bank, and so did not provide FDIC protection for depositors against its own bankruptcy.

The company was backed by Andreessen Horowitz [we'll be coming back to this in a future post (spoiler alert: Marc Andreessen is an arrogant, entitled idiot) -- MP] and had roughly 100 direct business relationships, indirectly serving 10 million retail customers through those relationships.

Following the bankruptcy declaration, "tens of thousands of U.S. businesses and consumers" lost access to Synapse's services, leaving questions as to the location of funds. In May 2024, former FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams, appointed as bankruptcy trustee, said there was a “shortfall” between Synapse’s records and those of the banks, estimated at $65 million to $96 million.

The CEO of Yotta Savings – a fintech company which relied on Synapse to manage customer deposits – released financial data in November 2024 showing that 13,725 former customers lost deposited money due to the Synapse bankruptcy. They were refunded $11.8 million, a fraction of their $64.9 million deposits. 

How do you follow up destroying the life savings of your customers? We'll let Patrick Boyle tell the next part of the story. [ChatGPT proofed from the transcript.]

In plain English—Synapse, which built the technology to know whose money is whose, has run out of money and no longer has any employees who can figure it out.

Well, where have they all gone? Sankaet Pathak, the founder and CEO of Synapse, announced in August that he had raised $11 million in VC funding for a new robotics startup called Foundation. In his Twitter video, he said that he had been working on the startup for three months—basically since the bankruptcy announcement—and his goal is to automate GDP through AI and robotics to free people from labor jobs, allowing them to pursue their passions.

He explains that declining birth rates will lead to severe labor shortages in 20–30 years, risking civilizational collapse, making this mission urgent. So yeah, I get that some people are worried about having lost their life savings—but Sankaet is battling civilizational collapse through AI robots… a noble cause indeed.

His near-term goal, he says, is to have a walking humanoid robot by year-end—that will be quite a breakthrough. If he needs one quickly, I’d buy that Honda one that was running around and kicking a football ten years ago.

It's a sign of the times. This guy drives his company into the ground then immediately gets investors to give him millions of dollars for an obviously thrown together knock-off of an Elon scheme that was itself a transparent con.