The gift needs to be able to come off as a genuine gift so there’s some plausible deniability…
Edit: Just so it’s clear, this is purely hypothetical. I just thought of the idea and thought it would be funny to see what a random person on Lemmy might think. This isn’t a serious request and none of the suggestions will ever actually be used.
Find out something that they were passionate about in life, but left by the wayside because they were ultimately a failure in it. Then get them something related to that. But make sure the gift is flawed in some way to be totally unuseable.