Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, wishing you a happy and healthy end of the year. I myself have a cold.
Today, we are looking back at the biggest stories in tech of 2025 – Elon Musk’s political rise, burst and fall; artificial intelligence’s subsumption of the global economy, all other technology, and even the Earth’s topography; Australia’s remarkable social media ban; the tech industry’s new Trumpian politics; and, as a treat, a glimpse of the apocalypse offered by one of Silicon Valley’s savviest and strangest billionaires.
Elon Musk, a one-man hurricane
At the close of 2024, I wrote that Elon Musk’s support of Donald Trump had made him the world’s most powerful unelected man. In 2025, his reign turned out to be short-lived. He rose fast and haphazardly, like a whizzing firework, only to explode spectacularly in June when he claimed in a post on X that the president of the United States was named in the government’s files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Even in that short period of less than six months, Musk made a tremendous impact. He tore up wide swaths of the US government – tens of thousands of jobs, the security of extremely sensitive data, and entire agencies like USAid – that may never be stitched back together.
After Doge imploded, Musk promised to turn back to his business empire, which saw great success and great failures alike in 2025. His rocket company SpaceX saw continued growth and is poised to conduct an initial public offering next year, perhaps as the most valuable private company in the world. Electric carmaker Tesla, by contrast, faced violent backlash and major competition from its Chinese counterparts, which produced cheaper and more advanced vehicles while Tesla’s innovation and inventory stagnated. These headwinds caused a global sales slump for Musk’s carmaker.
Look back at our reporting on Doge, Tesla, SpaceX, Musk himself:
The ‘department of government efficiency’
How an obscure US government office has become a target of Elon Musk
The chaos Elon Musk and Doge are leaving behind in Washington
Tesla faces backlash over Musk’s politics
Eggings, swastikas and dog poop: Tesla bears brunt of people’s ire against Musk
‘I’m selling the Nazi mobile’: Tesla owners offload cars after Musk’s fascist-style salutes
Look ahead: SpaceX expands in preparation for 2026 IPO
Inside Elon Musk’s plan to rain SpaceX’s rocket debris over Hawaii’s pristine waters
Elon Musk’s SpaceX ‘preparing for flotation that could value it at over $1tn’
Artificial intelligence blankets the world
Artificial intelligence has gone from a niche within tech to the industry’s most prominent focus. The Magnificent Seven – Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla – are investing hundreds of billions of dollars into new software that they hope will do the bulk of humanity’s work before too long. The investment is driving the bulk of the growth of the US’s economy, giving rise to fears of a financial bubble and its popping. The US and China are locked in a cold war-esque race against each other, with startups in each country vying for cutting-edge breakthroughs, as governments around the world are forced to decide how they will regulate a new technological force.
Before AI can arrive at that future, though, it needs brains a la the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. Those brains come in the form of datacenters. These massive buildings, which house the millions and millions of semiconductor chips booming AI development, have cropped up around the world, met with enthusiasm from leaders eager for tax revenue and deep concern from environmental advocates and, increasingly, local community members. The investment in and construction of datacenters wrought huge change in the physical landscape of the Earth in 2025 as tens of billions of dollars chased any available land, electricity, water and semiconductor chips.
More from our reporting in the last year:
Datacenters
The AI boom is heralding a new gold rush in the American west
Revealed: Big tech’s new datacentres will take water from the world’s driest areas
The future of AI
Multitrillion-dollar valuations
But does it work?
Tech gets in bed with Trump 2.0
Elon Musk made a full-throated and whole-hearted embrace of Donald Trump in 2024 and 2025. He was not alone. Many of his fellows in Silicon Valley did the same, sitting beside the Trump family at the president’s inauguration after donating millions to his inaugural committee. The tech giants continued their embrace of Trump and his policies by scuttling their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which they championed during Barack Obama’s presidency, and by cooperating with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Trump’s harsh immigration crackdown. What the industry gave, it reaped tenfold in deregulation, friends high up in Washington like JD Vance and David Sacks, and a Trump order for states not to regulate AI signed just weeks ago.
More from our reporting this year:
Donations and Trump’s inauguration
Elon Musk appears to give fascist-style salute after Trump inauguration – video
Trump inauguration: Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk seated in front of cabinet picks
‘The reign of terror is over’: my weird weekend partying with the triumphant tech right
DEI scuttled
Immigrants surveilled
Australia cuts teens off
This year saw Australia take the extraordinary measure of banning children under 16 from social media. The remarkable measure went into effect just weeks ago after a slew of legal challenges and protests from tech companies.
Read some of our comprehensive reporting on the ban:
The Guardian view on Australia’s social media ban: dragging tech companies into action | Editorial
Australia’s social media ban launched with barely a hitch – but the real test is still to come
Bonus: The Apostle Peter’s apocalyptic prayers
In the weirdest news of 2025, the billionaire venture capitalist and conservative svengali Peter Thiel gave a series of fevered, incoherent lectures about the antichrist and the coming of the end times. We obtained leaked audio of the talks. You can read for yourself the gibberish he uses to bend the ears of serious academics and San Francisco startup CEOs alike or, if you’d prefer not to give your attention directly to him, engage with a sharp critical interpretation by a professor hailing from the same university as Thiel’s mentor.
Our stories on the gospel according to Peter:
