Is MTS Member of the Technical Staff or Now Monitoring the Situation?

TIL: MTS Live is not a livestream of a Member of Technical Staff

When "MTS Live" first scrolled across my X feed, I assumed it was a livestream of a Member of Technical Staff. Some ex-unicorn CEO, now humbly pair-programming at a frontier lab, broadcasting his commits. A living, breathing MTS. Live.

It is not. MTS Live is Monitoring the Situation, an always-on news network that streams inside X. It launched April 20, 2026, with a16z's investment and a bench of angels behind it.

In my defense, Silicon Valley spent the last 18 months making the other MTS the most fashionable three letters in tech. So when the same three letters show up on a TV network funded by the same people, the confusion is the point. Two MTSs, one feed, overlapping cap tables.

So I did what any former newspaper reporter would do. I pulled the receipts: who holds the title, who funds the show, which phrase is older, and which one Google says people actually care about. The data didn't say what I expected it to.

The roll call: everyone who used to be somebody and is now "just" technical staff

In 2026 the flex is the demotion. Here is every notable founder, executive, professor or lab leader I could verify who took an individual-contributor seat at an AI lab, most of them with the literal title Member of Technical Staff.

Confirmed "member of technical staff" in the source:

1. Mike Krieger. Instagram co-founder and CTO, then Anthropic's Chief Product Officer. In January 2026 he became an MTS co-leading Anthropic Labs.
2. Tom Blomfield. Co-founded Monzo and GoCardless, then spent 4.5 years as a YC Group Partner. In July 2026 he took leave to join Anthropic's compute team as a member of technical staff.
3. Peter Bailis. Workday CTO, earlier a Google VP and founder of Sisu Data. He joined Anthropic as an MTS in reinforcement learning in March 2026.
4. Bryan McCann. You.com co-founder and CTO, now an Anthropic MTS since March 2026.
5. Niki Parmar. Co-founder and CTO of Adept and Essential AI, co-author of the Transformer paper. Anthropic technical staff since early 2025.
6. Jelani Nelson. Chair of UC Berkeley's Computer Science Division, on leave as an Anthropic MTS since July 2026.
7. Holden Karnofsky. Co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, and CEO of the latter. He joined Anthropic as a "member of the technical staff" in January 2025.
8. Sébastien Bubeck. Microsoft VP of AI research, an OpenAI MTS since October 2024.
9. Boaz Barak. Harvard computer science professor, on leave as an OpenAI "member of the technical staff".
10. Kyle Kosic. xAI co-founder who moved to OpenAI's technical staff in 2024.
11. Piotr Dollár. Meta research director for 11 years and Segment Anything co-author, now Thinking Machines Lab technical staff.

Big names in hands-on roles where the exact title isn't confirmed:

1. Andrej Karpathy. OpenAI co-founder, Tesla's Director of AI, Eureka Labs founder. He joined Anthropic's pre-training team in May 2026, and HackerNoon reported his X bio as "MTS".
2. John Schulman. OpenAI co-founder who left for hands-on work at Anthropic in 2024, then went to Thinking Machines.
3. Durk Kingma. OpenAI founding member who joined Anthropic in October 2024.
4. Ross Nordeen. xAI co-founder who moved to Anthropic's compute effort in May 2026.
5. Henry Shi. Super.com co-founder, COO and CTO. He joined Anthropic in 2025, though reports on his title conflict.
6. Sam Blackshear. Mysten Labs co-founder and CTO, now an Anthropic security researcher since August 2026.

One gap: I looked for marquee ex-executives taking MTS titles at xAI, Meta Superintelligence Labs, Microsoft AI and SSI and came up empty. The trend is concentrated at Anthropic, OpenAI and Thinking Machines.

Why a CTO takes the new-grad title

Nobody on that list is taking a pay cut. Business Insider, reading H-1B filings, found 2025 MTS base salaries of $300,000 to $405,000 at Anthropic and $210,000 to $530,000 at OpenAI, before equity. They are trading a title that signals power for one that signals proximity to the model.

The numbers behind the trend are real. By Stanford researchers Nick Bloom and Gideon Slocum Moore's LinkedIn analysis, as reported by Fast Company, 39% of Anthropic employees, 31% of OpenAI's and 26% of xAI's called themselves MTS in December 2025, and use of the title rose 50% in a year. LinkedIn data cited by Allwork.Space shows US hiring into MTS roles up 38% in 2025 and on pace for 58% in 2026, with about 45% of all US title-holders at just 10 companies.

The best explanations come from the people watching it happen:

• Elizabeth Eley, McGill professor, told Fast Company: "What's distinctive about it is that it's not distinctive at all." She adds that it is "hard for just anyone to understand what it is—which I think, frankly, [employers] kind of want."
• Henry Shi posted on X: "CTOs of billion dollar companies are quitting to take IC roles at Anthropic… The mission is that real."
• Anish Moonka posted on X: "On a LinkedIn profile, an outsider can't tell whether the person is running a research team or filing tickets. That opacity is the point."
• Andrej Karpathy announced: "I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D."
• Sam Blackshear of Mysten Labs said: "I have been happiest doing hands-on technical work while exploring new problem domains."
• Greg Brockman of OpenAI, per Business Insider, said the company did not want to "bucket people into researchers and engineers."
• The Next Web summed it up: "The move strips away a C-suite title in exchange for technical proximity to the frontier."

My read: the title is a costume. It says "I'm just an engineer" while the LinkedIn headline above it still reads "ex-CTO." The humility is the brand.

What MTS Live actually stands for

MTS Live is Monitoring the Situation, a 24/7 stream on X that bills itself as "the first timeline-native news network that's always on." a16z general partner Erik Torenberg and New Media's Brent Liang announced the firm's investment on April 20, 2026: "MTS aims to be the best place in the world to make sense of what's happening, RIGHT NOW, and it'll be on X." Angels include Dan Romero, Packy McCormick, Austin Rief and Jonathan Swanson. Neither the round size nor a16z's check has been disclosed.

The founding team is Chris Bakke, Theo Jaffee, Gabriel Dick and the pseudonymous @netcapgirl. Hosts include Mark Halperin, Steven Sinofsky, Jesse Genet and Nathan Labenz. That last group is worth pausing on: a former president of Microsoft's Windows division now monitors the situation on camera. The other MTS has its own ex-executives too.

The name is a meme with a cap table. @netcapgirl's January 16, 2025 post, "the masculine urge to monitor the situation," is the earliest documented use of the joke on Know Your Meme. It went fully viral in June 2025, when Israel struck Iran and every guy with a second monitor started posting flight maps. Ten months later the people who made the meme were running a network named after it.

The reviews were mixed:

• Axios framed it as Silicon Valley "building its own news-industrial complex" and quoted skeptics calling it "a well-funded livestream of venture partners switching tabs between X, prediction markets and Wikipedia."
• Gizmodo wrote: "So far, it's a lot like a Twitch stream featuring a16z partners," with guest segments that "probably shouldn't qualify as interviews."
• Torenberg's own framing: "To Monitor the Situation is to watch history in the making."

Day-one viewership was reported at about 180,000 by a Yahoo Finance syndication; treat that as soft. Torenberg's launch post itself drew 621,000 views.

What a16z is trying to do with New Media

a16z has been trying to own the medium for five years, and it says so in writing. Marc Andreessen has long described the firm's founding idea as "a media company that monetizes via investing". Here is how that idea became a department.

When	What happened
Jan 2021	a16z announces its own media property; critics say it "wants to replace the media" and "plans to eat the media"
June 2021	Future launches, edited by Sonal Chokshi
Late 2022	Future shuts down after "reader interest waned"
Apr 2025	a16z acquires Turpentine; Erik Torenberg becomes a GP running "media and network initiatives"
Nov 2025	"What Is New Media?" lays out the playbook
Jan 2026	The New Media Fellowship starts: 65 fellows, eight weeks in San Francisco
Apr 2026	a16z backs MTS
June 2026	"New Media, One Year In" reports about 1M X followers, 250K newsletter subscribers and 1M podcast downloads a month

The playbook is not subtle. In their own words:

• "Own your distribution; or better yet, use ours."
• "To win, you must go direct, and to go direct, you must be interesting." The service is literally branded "Go-Direct as a Service."
• "We're training a cohort of builders who know how to execute a timeline takeover."
• Ben Horowitz, in a line read on the firm's February 2026 podcast: "Old media is terrified of upsetting people… When in doubt, flood the zone." His reaction on air: "That sounds like something I said."
• Marc Andreessen, same episode: "basically the role of mainstream media for the rest of our life is just going to be to follow the internet viral posts."
• Andreessen in 2013, quoted by CJR: "it causes me a certain amount of pleasure today watching the New York Times Company try to cope."

The critics have been consistent too. In 2021, CJR's Mathew Ingram reported the firm had "largely stopped cooperating with the media, even off the record," and quoted Casey Newton: "I'm leery of any company that thinks regularly talking to journalists is beneath them." Future's own editor said in 2021, "We're not going to do what good reporters do, in terms of investigative journalism."

The closest comparison is OpenAI's April 2026 purchase of TBPN, which reportedly went for "low hundreds of millions" and now sits in OpenAI's strategy org under Chris Lehane. OpenAI's Fidji Simo promised TBPN will "make their own editorial decisions." Fortune's Alexei Oreskovic answered: "the quickest way to control the narrative is to literally own the medium that distributes it."

Old money funding new media is the oldest media business model

a16z is old money in internet years and new money in every other kind of year. Andreessen Horowitz was founded in 2009, and Marc Andreessen's fortune dates to the 1995 Netscape IPO. Thirty years online is roughly the Habsburgs. To a Rockefeller it is a rounding error. With more than $90 billion under management and over 18% of US venture dollars in 2025, it has the money to buy whatever pipe comes next.

Rich people funding the newest medium is not a 2026 innovation. Sometimes the agenda is printed on the masthead. Sometimes it takes a court case, a congressional hearing or a leak to find it.

Year	Money	New media	Agenda	How it went
1450s	Johann Fust, Mainz lender	Gutenberg's printing press	Open: a loan with interest	Fust sued and took the press. The first media investor also did the first founder ouster.
1887	George Hearst, mining fortune	Son William's San Francisco Examiner	Open-ish: a senator's mouthpiece	Became the yellow-journalism empire that helped push the US toward war with Spain.
1950–1967	The CIA, via the Congress for Cultural Freedom	Encounter and dozens of journals	Hidden: Cold War influence	Exposed in 1966–67. Many contributors had no idea who paid.
1950–1971	US government	Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty	Covertly CIA-funded until 1971	Now openly funded, and the template for "we're just telling you what's happening."
1980	Ted Turner's billboard fortune	CNN, the first 24-hour news network	Open: always-on news	The format MTS is rebuilding on X.
1993–1997	Richard Mellon Scaife, Mellon heir	The American Spectator's "Arkansas Project"	Hidden: opposition research on Bill Clinton	About $2.4M routed through a magazine. Old money, literally.
2013	Pierre Omidyar	First Look Media, The Intercept	Open: adversarial journalism	Pledged $250M; scaled back within a few years.
2013	Jeff Bezos	The Washington Post, $250M	Open	The owner became the story by 2024.
2012–2016	Peter Thiel	Bollea v. Gawker	Hidden, then revealed	Gawker went bankrupt.
2015	Sheldon Adelson's family	Las Vegas Review-Journal	Hidden: buyer undisclosed	Unmasked by the paper's own reporters.
2022	Elon Musk	Twitter, $44B	Open: "free speech"	Now X, MTS's only distribution channel.
2026	OpenAI; a16z	TBPN; MTS Live	Open, in writing	"Own your distribution; or better yet, use ours."

The a16z version has one new feature: disclosure. The New Media team exists to help portfolio companies win the narrative, and MTS interviews "the main characters of the moment," some of whom are portfolio founders. That is not a hidden agenda. It is a published one. Whether publishing it makes it better is a question for the audience.

New media, or old media in a hoodie?

MTS is cable news with a different cable. Andreessen said as much at launch, comparing the concept to an idea from a book on CNN's early days. Swap the satellite for X, the anchors for posters and the wire feed for Polymarket, and you have MTS.

What is actually new:

• The distribution layer belongs to one man's rocket-and-AI holding company, not a cable carrier.
• Prediction-market odds are treated as a news source.
• The audience is also the cast.

What is not new: a rich backer, a point of view, guests who are friends of the owner, and a promise to tell you what's really happening.

Now the bubble case. In six months we got OpenAI buying TBPN, a16z running a New Media fellowship, and MTS. AI labs are hiring editors too: Quill reports Anthropic posted a managing editor opening and OpenAI a $275,000 storytelling lead. Brian Morrissey described VC-aligned "operator media" as having "no journalists, no editorial separation, no accountability", and "more likely to confirm the worldview of its audience than challenge it."

When VCs fund shows that interview VCs about companies those VCs funded, that is not a media market. It is a marketing budget with a lower-third graphic. TBPN, by the WSJ's numbers in the Mediagazer roundup, made about $5 million in ads in 2025 before OpenAI bought it and announced the ad business would wind down. When the buyer doesn't need the revenue, the revenue was never the point.

Media bubbles don't pop like stock bubbles. They get acquired, get folded into a comms department, or quietly stop streaming. The test is simple: would the show exist if no one on its cap table needed a narrative?

I say this as someone who runs new media. HackerNoon started on Medium in 2016 and has no staff writers, only contributors. The difference that matters isn't the camera or the platform. It's who pays, and whether they need you to believe something.

Which MTS came first? Technical staff, by about 80 years

"Member of the technical staff" appears in print by 1871. "Monitor the situation" couldn't exist until "monitor" became a verb in 1924, and its earliest verified use I found is 1952. I went through Internet Archive scans of 19th- and 20th-century journals to date both.

Member of (the) Technical Staff, earliest uses:

1. 1871: Engineering, writing on the Mont Cenis Tunnel, praises "even the members of the technical staff, who have contributed to the accomplishment."
2. September 1890: Science and Scientific American describe Herbert Laws Webb's time "as a member of the technical staff of the Silvertown Telegraph Company."
3. May 27, 1898: The New York Times mentions "the Captain of the port, and other members of the technical staff."
4. April 1925: the first use I found as a formal job title, three months after Bell Telephone Laboratories opened, in the Journal of the AIEE: "SUMMERS, HARRY ANDERSON, Member of Technical Staff, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., 463 West St."
5. January 1935: Bell System Technical Journal author bios read "Member, Technical Staff, Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1928-."
6. 1979: a computer graphics textbook thanks "many members of the technical staff of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center."
7. December 2015: Greg Brockman later wrote that "Alan Kay advised that they used 'Member of Technical Staff' at Xerox Parc, we loved & adopted it" when starting OpenAI.

Monitor / monitoring the situation, earliest uses:

1. 1924: "monitor" becomes a verb, meaning to check radio signals; the general "keep under review" sense arrives in 1944, and Merriam-Webster also dates the verb to 1924.
2. 1952: the Congressional Record: "The Senator asked me who should monitor the situation."
3. March 1955: a US military Project Lamp Light report: "raw radar input for further monitoring the situation."
4. 1958: Army magazine: "get out an order, monitor the situation and keep his commander informed."
5. 1962: the Mercury astronauts' memoir We Seven: "asked to monitor the situation and to ask John Glenn a few calm questions."
6. About 2017: an Imgflip macro reading "WE ARE EXPERIENCING UPSTREAM PROVIDER ISSUES / WE ARE MONITORING THE SITUATION," which predates Know Your Meme's stated origin.
7. January 16, 2025: @netcapgirl's "masculine urge" post, followed by the June 2025 explosion.

A correction worth making: HackerNoon's own earlier piece credited the title's creation to Alan Kay at Xerox PARC. The Bell Labs record beats PARC by roughly 45 years. Google Books Ngram also shows scattered "monitor the situation" hits before 1924; those predate the verb and are almost certainly misdated scans.

Google Trends report: people search the job, not the show

I expected "monitoring the situation" to win on search. I was wrong. In US Google searches since 2004, "member of technical staff" averages 10 on Google's 0–100 scale and "monitoring the situation" averages 1. I pulled the data on October 15, 2026, using exact-phrase queries.

Measure (US, Google Trends)	Member of technical staff	Monitoring the situation
All-time average, 2004–Oct 2026	10	1
First month with measurable interest	Sep 2010	Aug 2015
Average, 2011–2023	about 6–12 a year	near 0
Average, 2025	26	8
Average, 2026 so far	76	27
Peak month	100, Jun and Jul 2026	74, Mar 2026
October 2026	71	19

Three things stand out. First, the job title has a steady 15-year baseline; the phrase didn't register at all until the meme. Second, both terms broke out in 2025–26, which is the same story told twice. Third, interest in "monitoring the situation" peaked in March 2026, a month before MTS Live launched, and has drifted to 11–19 since. The network launched after the meme crested.

The likely reason the title wins: people search a job title when they want the job. With base pay of $200,000 to $500,000-plus, a lot of people want that job.

Books: the situation took over around 2000

Print tells the opposite story. In the Google Books English corpus, "member of (the) technical staff" dominated for most of the 20th century, peaking in the late 1980s at about 215 mentions per billion words. "Monitor/monitoring the situation" passed it around 2000. By 2020–22 the situation phrases ran about 97 per billion words to technical staff's 6, roughly 17 to 1.

Which has more pages?

Search engines no longer publish page counts you can trust. Bing reported "3,570 results" for the exact phrase "monitoring the situation," which is obviously not the size of the web, and showed no count at all for the job title. So the books corpus is the best page-count proxy available, and there "monitoring the situation" wins by a wide margin. Institutions say it in every crisis statement. The other phrase mostly lives on résumés and job boards.

Doubling down: one MTS builds it, the other sells it

Score it round by round and it's a draw. The job title wins on age, search interest and star power. The situation wins on books, memes and becoming a business. Both are paid for by the same small circle.

I started this thinking the two MTSs were a funny collision. After the research I think they are two halves of one machine, and the data makes the case stronger, not weaker.

Members of Technical Staff build the model. Monitors of the Situation narrate it. Nearly a third of OpenAI's employees call themselves the first, and OpenAI now owns a show full of the second. Musk's stack runs from SpaceX to xAI to X, MTS Live's only distribution. a16z writes checks to the labs and to the network that interviews them.

Both titles are the same move. A billionaire founder calls himself technical staff to signal "I'm just an engineer." A VC-funded network calls itself Monitoring the Situation to signal "we're just watching." Both are humility as branding. Neither is humble about who it serves.

So here is the conclusion, doubled:

1. New media is old media with new owners. From Fust's press to Hearst's Examiner to CNN to MTS, rich money buys the newest pipe. Only the pipe changes.
2. a16z is old money that still acts new. Thirty years of internet wealth, a published playbook for winning the narrative, and the candor to say "use ours" out loud. The disclosure is the innovation, not the media.
3. The bubble is in narrative, not media. OpenAI buying TBPN and winding down its ads tells you what the show is for. Funding shows that explain why the funds were smart works until the funds stop being smart.
4. People want to be one MTS and watch the other. Google Trends says Americans search the job title ten times as often as the phrase. Books say institutions say the phrase 17 times as often as the title. Everyone wants the $400,000 badge; everyone else gets the livestream.

The frontier labs made "just technical staff" the most prestigious title in tech. The VCs made "just watching" a 24/7 network. When everybody important insists they're "just" something, keep monitoring the situation.