We put quotes around that word in the title. I'll add an explanation here in a bit.
Edit: ok, here's an explanation.
We put quotes around "bribes" because that's the tiniest intervention I can think of that still addresses your concern. Why so tiny? That takes a while to explain, so read on if you want to understand how we approach this.
The title breaks the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) by being both baity and misleading. It also contradicts the article text (assuming I read it correctly), since it declares a thing to have happened which the text itself reports as not having happened, if you read it to the end. Such a bait-and-switch is a marker of a bad article.
Normally the moderation on this would be a no-brainer. We'd replace the title with one that is accurate and neutral, and we'd apply a standard downweight that we put on outrage stories which don't contain anything of intellectual interest, especially when the topic has appeared many times before. If we didn't do these things, HN's front page would consist of nothing but dime-a-dozen outrage and the elves would leave middle earth.
However, when the story is negative about YC or a YC-funded company, the regular rules don't apply; we still moderate, but we do it less. That is the first thing pg taught me about how to moderate HN, and the first thing I've taught every other moderator. I've written about this many times: e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date....
Frankly, it bites to see an article get away with this kind of thing on HN when we spend every day trying to keep the front page good. But that's the price we pay for being able to answer users' concerns about conflicts of interest in moderating HN. It doesn't prevent a few people from saying awful things about us—this is the internet after all—but it does let us answer in good conscience. Doing our best and answering questions seems to be enough to keep most HN users happy, which is the thing we care most about.