Stripe isn’t exactly a dumb company. When someone smart does something seemingly super dumb, more likely than not you’re the one missing something, not them. It’s an opportunity to ask, “what am I missing?”, and learn from it.
Are you sure that the value is in the wrapper and not rather in the fact that investors who invested into OpenRouter also invested into companies that can buy OpenRouter? ;-)
(see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330668 ).
I guess hardly anybody claims that. I think the suspicion is rather about whether there exist some other "puppetmasters" (e.g. venture capitalists) who pressured Stripe into buying OpenRouter.