A look back at the biggest tech stories of the year, from the rise and fall of Musk’s Doge to lucrative investments into AI
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.
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 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.
