On June 10, 2020, Rob Monster posted a public thank you note to the Epik staff. It was a standard corporate gesture, listing names like Jessica, Amy, and Stephen. But right there in the middle of the list, sandwiched between Jessica and Amy, is a name that doesn’t belong on a payroll… Miao.
Monster didn’t thank Marcelo Goncalves, his Director of Network Operations. He thanked Miao, the anime persona of the 19-year-old kid he hired to run his infrastructure.
This tweet encapsulates the entire Epik farce in fewer than 280 characters. You have a CEO trying to project the image of a serious, diverse technology company, using hashtags like #diversity to signal corporate virtue. Yet, in the same breath, he’s validating the anonymous anime handle of a teenager operating out of a bedroom in Portugal.
It strips away the suit-and-tie pretense of the operation. Legitimate companies do not list anime handles in their annual reports or staff shout-outs. But Epik was never a legitimate company. It was a clubhouse for the deplatformed, run by a CEO who saw no distinction between a professional engineer and a kid with a cat-boy avatar.
When you look at this tweet, you’re not seeing a boss thanking an employee, you’re seeing the leader of the “alt-tech” revolution admitting that his digital fortress was being guarded by a character from a role-playing game, blurring the lines between professional business and internet fantasy.
