For example, a recent story about the openclaw creator using $1.3M of tokens/month. And let's assume he's getting paid $5M/yr which is probably a vast under estimate.

Is he providing value that a traditional software development org with normal developers couldn't provide for $20M/yr?

Yes, we've lost the ability to quickly send pieces of paper to arbitrary homes, but there really isn't a need for it when you have better alternatives.

So I found some always on lab machine and ran squid on it, so I could get on the Internet through the labs from my dorm.

Turns out some tech found it after a few months, and tried to kill it but ended up fork bombing the system. And it fork bombed again whenever they rebooted it. That system apparently was the one used for scheduling anything at the college and they weren't happy with it going down.

At like 8am one day 3 techies knocked on my door and were like "uhhh..please don't run squid any more" and that was that.

It was a glorious 3 months though when I was getting 1mb/s downloads and everyone else around me was getting 75kb/s

You know what happens when you call it in? The government sends a letter to the registered address of the truck saying, basically "Hey! Your emissions are very wasteful, you should get that checked out!". Glad California seems to have some teeth to the emissions laws.