Elon Musk's stint as "First Buddy" has drawn to a close. But the subject of his boss and ally, president Donald Trump, appears to still be an open wound.
In an <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-on-doge-trump-administration-and-responsibility-for-cuts/">interview</a> with <a href="https://youtu.be/ey1rpNtRADg?si=_LrUmA00OVL5el9t">CBS Sunday Morning</a>, Musk visibly squirmed when asked a question about the Trump administration <a href="https://apnews.com/article/harvard-international-students-judge-70a69446b265877b801e91b250547cb4">attempting to ban international students</a> from entering Harvard University — and remained touchy about anything Trump-related throughout the conversation.
"I'm wondering what your thought is on the ban on foreign students, the proposal," asked CBS's David Pogue. "I mean, you were one of those kids, right?"
It was a pertinent question; Musk indeed attended university in America <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-was-illegal-immigrant">as an international student</a>, jumpstarting his career. But the billionaire had no interest in discussing that tension.
"Yeah. I mean, I think we wanna stick to, you know, the subject of the day, which is, like, spaceships, as opposed to, you know, presidential policy," Musk said. (The interview was conducted right before the most recent test flight of Musk's Starship last Tuesday. After a successful lift-off, both stages of the SpaceX megarocket <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-starship-improvements-failure">exploded</a>.)
"Oh, okay," Pogue said. "I was told anything is good, but..."
"No, well — no," Musk responded, less than artfully dodging the question.
But when given the chance, Musk aired out some of his grievances about his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and how his time there tanked his <a href="https://futurism.com/musk-why-mad">personal reputation</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-tesla-spacex-reputation-sentiment">that of his businesses</a>, especially his EV automaker <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-targeted-protests-vandalism">Tesla</a>.
"It's a bit unfair because, like, DOGE became the whipping boy for everything," Musk complained. "So, if there was some cut, real or imagined, everyone would blame DOGE." 
Perhaps Musk's resentment for being a convenient lightning rod for the Trump administration goes both ways — at the public who despised him, and his political allies for throwing him to the wolves.
We're reading between the lines, of course. But, without even being asked, Musk later launched into a rant about the administration, and didn't have only nice things to say.
"It's not like I agree with everything the administration does," Musk said. "I agree with much of what the administration does. But we have differences of opinion."
"There are things that I don't entirely agree with. But it's difficult for me to bring that up in an interview because then it creates a bone of contention," Musk continued. "I'm a little stuck in a bind, where I'm like, well, I don't wanna, you know, speak up against the administration, but I also don't wanna take responsibility for everything this administration's doing."
Ding ding ding. There's that hint of "whipping boy" bitterness again.
Musk also singled out Trump's new proposed spending bill, which would heap another $3.8 trillion onto the national debt over the next decade; the whole point of DOGE was to slash $1 trillion in federal spending, and under Musk's leadership it <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-doge-dismal-failure">didn't even come close</a> to that figure.
"I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, doesn't decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing," Musk said.
It was a fatal error. Within 24 hours of CBS sharing a clip of the interview segment where Musk criticized the bill, the world's richest man announced on his website X that his time as a "special government employee" was over. 

More on Elon Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-elon-musk-jared-isaacman-nomination-nasa">Trump Just Kicked Elon Musk's Hand-Picked NASA Head to the Curb</a>

Touchy Subject

"I think we wanna stick to, you know, the subject of the day, which is, like, spaceships, as opposed to, you know, presidential policy."

Elon Musk Squirms When Asked Tough Questions

Edible enjoyers, beware.
In a new paper <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/article-abstract/2834540">published in the journal JAMA Cardiology</a>, researchers from the University of California at San Francisco found that ingesting cannabis-infused goodies can carry similar risks to your heart as smoking the stuff.
For years now, heart experts have warned, based on a <a href="https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/marijuana-may-be-risky-for-your-heart-2020070120347">growing body of evidence</a>, that smoking cannabis is <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/cannabis-users-heart-attacks">quite bad for the old ticker</a> — but this study appears to be the first that looked into whether edibles had similar effects.
UCSF's researchers recruited 55 Bay Area denizens who either abstained completely or smoked or ate cannabis a few times a week to see how their hearts fared over three years.
At the end of those three years, the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-using cohort as a whole had reduced blood vessel function and were more likely to develop premature heart disease — a finding that dashes the oft-repeated suggestion that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/well/cannabis-weed-edibles-smoking.html">eating weed is necessarily better</a> for you than smoking it.
In an <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/cannabis/article/ucsf-cannabis-heart-health-risks-20349621.php">interview with the San Francisco Gate</a>, UCSF heart researcher and co-study author Matthew Springer said he was personally surprised to find that edibles showed similar signs of heart damage as smoked cannabis.
"When I first saw the THC result, I said to [lead study author] Leila [Mohammadi], 'Scientifically, this THC result is really interesting but boy does it screw up the public health messaging,'" he laughed.
There were some other curious differences between the smokers and the edible-eaters, however, that makes sussing out the heart-harming mechanism difficult.
Specifically, the researchers found that although the cannabis smoking cohort had changes to their blood serum that were demonstrated to be harmful to their blood cells — which prior studies have also found — the folks who ate edibles did not.
What's more, when testing for nitric oxide, an important blood compound for heart health and immune function, smokers had lower levels, while edible users' levels were normal.
To Springer's mind, those disparities suggest that smoking is a "double whammy" for heart health.
Disparities aside, Springer said he and his colleagues are "pretty confident" that regular cannabis use damages the cardiovascular system regardless of how you ingest it — and "it really does seem like the more you take, the worse it is."
More on weed health: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/cannabis-users-heart-attacks">Stoners Vastly More Likely to Have Heart Attacks At a Young Age</a>

Brownie Points

Studies

Well this sucks!

New Study Finds Serious Risk to Eating Edibles

Billionaire Elon Musk reportedly still owes president Donald Trump an eye-watering $100 million out of the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-donald-trump-2024-election-b2690735.html">$300 million</a> he committed to get the reality TV star elected.
That's <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-elon-musk-relationship-64773ad1?mod=hp_lead_pos4">according to the Wall Street Journal</a>, which reports that now that the bromance between the two has seemingly ground to a halt, Musk isn't keeping the cash flowing. Trump's advisors said that the latest $100 million check hasn't arrived yet, in perhaps the most concrete sign yet of a widening rift between the two larger-than-life figures.
Just last week, Musk <a class="underline hover:text-futurism hover:no-underline transition-all duration-200 ease-in-out" href="https://futurism.com/elon-black-eye-drug-claims">showed up at his own White House goodbye party</a> with a mysterious black eye, the perfect symbol for a bruising couple of weeks marked by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/politics/elon-musk-black-eye.html">heated exchanges and an alleged brawl</a>.
Though Musk and Trump had an intense public friendship over the course of the election and the early days of the administration, the White House has increasingly been resorting to damage control to keep a raging Musk in check.
Most recently, according to the WSJ, Musk became so incensed after learning of a meeting between Trump and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — one of his <a href="https://futurism.com/sam-altman-elon-musk-insecurity">most reviled enemies</a> — that the meeting was pushed back to appease him. Altman ended up never appearing at a planned public event with Trump, per the WSJ.
Musk has maintained that his efforts to brutally slash government agency budgets were never taken seriously enough in Washington, while Trump officials have <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-officials-calling-musk-crazy-uncle-elon">mocked him</a> for his childish demeanor and cringe humor.
According to the WSJ, Musk's decision-making at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency frequently went behind the backs of Trump officials, forcing the president himself to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/elon-musk-trump-white-house-doge-43c4d404?mod=article_inline">appoint Musk a babysitter</a>.
Musk has frequently butted heads with key Trump appointees and was <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-trouble-donald-trump-tariffs">reportedly furious</a> about the president's plans to roll out extreme tariffs, which have caused endless chaos for the global economy.
Last month, Musk also <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-turns-on-trump-bill">turned against Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill</a>," arguing it was needlessly adding trillions of dollars to the deficit and "undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing," <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-disappointed-by-trump-big-beautiful-bill-doge/">he told CBS News</a>.
Prior to his departure, the mercurial CEO had cut down his time at the White House from up to seven days per week to just occasional visits.
In short, there are numerous reasons to believe that the relationship has finally gone up in flames, bookending a turbulent couple of months.
Meanwhile, Musk has gone on to lick his wounds. Tesla has seen sales and <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-absolutely-destroyed-europe">revenues drop off a cliff</a> in large part due to his embrace of far-right ideologies and <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-ponders-unpopularity">extremely unpopular</a> gutting of the federal government.
For his part, Trump has maintained that his relationship with Musk is as healthy as ever.
"Elon is not really leaving," he said during Musk's goodbye party last week. "He’s going to be back and forth."
That's hard to imagine. Musk once promised to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-failed-cuts-sleepovers">slash $2 trillion</a> in government spending, a figure that appears to have been off by several orders of magnitude — and even that'd be a <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-wasted-taxpayer-money-incompetence">charitable interpretation at best</a>.
"Was it all bullsh*t?" Trump recently asked advisers about Musk's failed plans to cut such a huge figure from the budget, as quoted by the WSJ.
More on Elon and Donald: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-ponders-unpopularity">Elon Musk Trying to Figure Out Who’s to Blame for His Massive Unpopularity</a>

Bounced Check

It's so over.

Elon Musk Reportedly Owes Donald Trump a Colossal Sum of Money

NASA's top candidate for its still-open administrator position — a space tourist who was handpicked to run the agency by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — has been thrown under the bus by the Trump administration.
As <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/05/31/2025/white-house-expected-to-pull-nasa-nominee-isaacman">scooped by Semafor</a>, the White House has pulled its nomination for billionaire fighter jet pilot-turned-SpaceX astronaut Jared Isaacman.
While the exact reasoning behind the eyebrow-raising move remains unclear at best — a White House spokesperson said Isaacman wasn't in "full alignment with" the Trump agenda — the timing of the announcement comes as Musk's relationship with the Trump administration is <a href="https://futurism.com/sense-elon-musk-desperation">visibly fraying</a>.
The mercurial CEO <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-black-eye-drug-claims">arrived at his own White House goodbye party</a> last week with a black eye, which he blamed on his five-year-old son, bookending chaotic and destructive months in Washington, DC. Given <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/politics/elon-musk-black-eye.html">recent reports</a>, a <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-turns-on-trump-bill">major rift appears to have opened up</a> between Musk and Trumpworld.
In other words, it's easy to imagine that the Trump administration pulled Isaacman from consideration out of retribution, given the latter's extremely cozy relationship with Musk.
During his confirmation hearing, the former NASA administrator hopeful had to <a href="https://futurism.com/jared-isaacman-nasa-spacex">repeatedly assure lawmakers</a> he wasn't in the pocket of the richest man in the world, going as far as to <a href="https://futurism.com/incoming-nasa-administrator-elon-musk-mars-plans">diverge from Musk's plans</a> to make sending humans to Mars a top priority.
But it was hard to see much daylight between the two. The SpaceX CEO played a key role in Isaacman's nomination, catapulting him to the front of the line.
As such, the pulling of his nomination could represent a major blow to SpaceX, which has relied heavily on NASA contracts to sustain itself since its early years.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has indicated that it's planning to catastrophically <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-budget-proposal-brutal-cuts-nasa">slash the space agency's science budget</a>, an existential risk for major interplanetary missions, including NASA's next major space telescope and Mars Sample Return mission.
Isaacman said he planned to lead missions to <a href="https://futurism.com/jared-isaacman-nasa-defies-elon-musk-moon-mars">both the Moon and Mars simultaneously</a>, despite extremely slimmed-down budgets, potentially handing SpaceX major contracts for trips to the Red Planet on board its still-under-development Starship rocket.
But now that he's been kicked to the curb by the Trump administration, lawmakers are bound to ask some tough questions. The US Senate Commerce Committee approved his nomination in late April, voting 19 to nine, including unanimous support from Republicans, as <a href="https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/trump-pulls-isaacman-nomination-for-space-source-nasa-is-fed/">Ars Technica reports</a>.
In spite of his close ties to Musk, Isaacman remains a popular figure in the space community, likely making his abrupt departure a tough pill to swallow for many influential figures.
"NASA is f*cked," a current NASA leader to Ars.
"NASA's budget request is just a going-out-of-business mode without Jared there to innovate," a separate NASA leader added.
Chances are that Isaacman could make his return to his civilian space exploration program, Polaris Dawn, which was <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/jared-isaacman-head-nasa-pause-space-travel">put "on hold</a>" following his nomination. In September, he became the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-private-spacewalk">first private astronaut</a> to go on a spacewalk outside of a SpaceX spacecraft.
Now that he's become the victim of the murky machinations of an administration that has long been known to throw anybody who fails Trump's loyalty test to the wolves, chances are he may soon be headed off-planet once again to <a href="https://futurism.com/incoming-nasa-administrator-jared-isaacman-no-idea">leave all of that drama behind</a>.
More on Isaacman: <a href="https://futurism.com/incoming-nasa-administrator-elon-musk-mars-plans">Incoming NASA Administrator Throws Elon Musk's Mars Plans Under the Bus</a>

Hard Feelings

The bromance is officially over.

Trump Just Kicked Elon Musk's Hand-Picked NASA Head to the Curb

As his time in DC disintegrated this week, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/05/27/elon-musk-spacex-starship-doge/">Musk intimated to the Washington Post</a> that he was very surprised by what he saw in American government — but not as surprised as he was by everyone's reaction.
"The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized," the billionaire told the newspaper. "I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least."
That "uphill battle" apparently included getting people on board with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the cost-cutting agency that Musk was seemingly gifted in exchange for his help getting Donald Trump elected.
While the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-employees-jokes">boy-brained billionaire</a> wasn't exactly popular before his debut in American politics, he and his agency have become downright detested in 2025. From its <a href="https://futurism.com/doge-operative-surprise">iffy mandate</a> and its enormous <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-doge-failing">failure to reach its savings goals</a> to its massive <a href="https://futurism.com/doge-kid-helped-cybercrime-ring">professional</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/social-security-elon-musk-crash-system">competence breaches</a>, DOGE has been a major dud — and <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-too-late-save-tesla">Musk's companies</a> are bearing the brunt.
But ask Musk, and he has no idea why everybody is so mad. As he told it to WaPo, the agency mysteriously became the "whipping boy for everything."
"Something bad would happen anywhere," Musk said, "and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it."
Despite his <a href="https://futurism.com/sense-elon-musk-desperation">attempts at a breezy reboot this week</a>, it's clear the uber-wealthy memelord is aware that the public hates him and his politics — but the alleged "<a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/twitter-suspending-more-people">free speech absolutist</a>" can't seem to figure out why people would want to take their righteous anger out on his company's cars.
"People were burning Teslas," he lamented. "Why would you do that? That’s really uncool."
This isn't the first time Musk has searched around dumbfounded, like a confused John Travolta in "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaMRzF9arDc">Pulp Fiction</a>," looking for the reason people are <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-billionaire-tesla-blame">taking their anger out Teslas</a>.
In March, the world's sometimes-richest man took to the social network he purchased to claim that an "<a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1898369343399899218">investigation</a>" had found five individuals, along with a liberal-leaning fundraising platform, were behind the widespread protests against his electric vehicle company.
He didn't acknowledge, of course, the crux of those protests: that <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-support-falling-trump">even Republicans</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/poll-favorability-elon-musk-doge">former fanboys</a> consider the mass firing of civil servants toxic, and that his own poor approval ratings were <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-trump-negative-poll-rating-2022886">bringing down Trump's</a>.
Despite his unceremonious exit from government, DOGE's work will go on in Musk's stead, and the agency will soon be "tackling projects with the highest gain for the pain, which still means a lot of good things in terms of reducing waste and fraud."
Today in Washington, as in South Texas, it's business as usual as the White House <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5321952-white-house-doge-cuts-package-congress/">prepares to send a new slew of DOGE cuts</a> to Congress in a spending bill and <a href="https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/spacex-starlink-10-32-b1080-ksc-jrti">SpaceX launches more than two dozen Starlink satellites</a> aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
Life in DC has gone on after Musk has left the building — <a href="https://poets.org/poem/hollow-men">not with a bang</a>, but with a whimper.
More on Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/sense-elon-musk-desperation">You Can Suddenly Sense Elon Musk's Desperation</a>

Sadboi

Whose fault could it be!?

Elon Musk Trying to Figure Out Who’s to Blame for His Massive Unpopularity

A teen tech entrepreneur is working to retrofit robots with simulated artificial bodily functions like a virtual heart rate, body temperature, and sweating response — a bong-rip idea to make them better emulate human emotional states like joy or anxiety.
In an <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/25/why-intempus-thinks-robots-should-have-a-human-physiological-state/">interview with TechCrunch</a>, the 19-year-old founder of "<a href="https://teddywarner.org/">emotionally intelligent robots</a>" company Intempus, Teddy Warner, explained why he's imbuing AI with digital versions of the often-uncomfortable sensations you feel during spells of heightened emotion like fear and anxiety.
Warner told the website that he got the idea for his company while working at the <a href="https://futurism.com/google-image-israel-kamakawiwoole-ai">AI image generator outfit Midjourney</a>.
During his time at that company, the researcher and his coworkers were tasked with building out a so-called "world AI" model, which essentially means an AI that makes decisions like humans do in the real world.
While world models have <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/14/what-are-ai-world-models-and-why-do-they-matter/">made waves in the AI industry</a> in recent years, they've fallen short because, as Warner puts it, they're being <a href="https://a16z.com/world-models-and-the-sparks-of-little-robotics/">trained on data from robots</a> that heretofore have lacked the kind of physiological feedback humans have.
"Robots currently go from A to C, that is observation to action, whereas humans, and all living things, have this intermediary B step that we call physiological state," he explained to TechCrunch. "Robots don’t have physiological state. They don’t have fun, they don’t have stress."
For robots to understand our human world, they need "be able to communicate with humans in a way that is innate to us, that is less uncanny, more predictable, we have to give them this B step," he continued.
In short, Warner thinks robots need to be able to feel like we feel. After hooking himself and his buddies up to polygraph tests to capture their sweat data, the youthful founder built out an AI model that can, as he told the website, "essentially allow robots to have an emotional composition" based on lie detector data.
Depending on how much Kool-Aid you've had to drink, the concept of feeling robots — and AI trained on lie detector tests — is either goofy or terrifying. The latter vibe is worsened by Warner's <a href="https://x.com/WarnerTeddy/status/1925546276365771231">recent announcement</a> that he'd won a Thiel Fellowship, which the controversial tech billionaire Peter Thiel awards to several youngsters each year to fund their entrepreneurial dreams.
Since September, Warner has built out the <a href="https://intempus.org/research/">Intempus research apparatus</a> and managed to sign seven partners in the process. He's now hiring staffers and working on testing his retrofitted feeling robots in front of customers — though he says he's not opposed to building his own robots in the future.
"I have a bunch of robots, and they run a bunch of emotions," he told TechCrunch. "I want to have someone come in and just understand that this robot is a joyful robot, and if I can innately convey some emotion, some intents that the robot holds, then I’ve done my job properly."
More on robots: <a href="https://futurism.com/thailand-humanoid-robot-police-uniform">Thailand Deploys Humanoid Robot Dressed in Police Uniform</a>

Model Behavior

"I have a bunch of robots, and they run a bunch of emotions."

New AI Startup Giving Robots Virtual Heart Rate, Body Temperature, Sweating Response So They Can Better Emulate Human Emotions Like Fear and Anxiety

Sexual <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-girlfriend-encouraged-suicide">relationships with AI chatbots</a> have become all too common — but for some real-life partners, it still feels like cheating when it's happening behind their back.
That's the takeaway from a <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/does-cheating-with-ai-count_uk_6825eab2e4b0a8ff0de6b667">recent HuffPost column</a> in which Marisa Cohen, a licensed marriage and family therapist, affirmed that having intimate encounters with anyone — or anything — without your partner's consent is damaging to the relationship, point-blank.
The piece was responding to a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AmIOverreacting/comments/1kmyx4s/am_i_overreacting_i_overheard_my_husband_having/">post on Reddit</a>, which — though they're often anonymous and an exercise in creative fiction writing — served as an interesting jumping-off point to explore the ethics of the topic.
In the post, which has since been deleted but copied in part by HuffPost, a woman described her sense of betrayal when she walked in on her husband of 14 years having phone sex with a talking chatbot that was "very tailored to his desires."
"It felt like a knife went through me," the OP wrote, "and I couldn’t stop shaking."
An interesting wrinkle: the woman and her husband had agreed prior to tying the knot that "emotional cheating" was kosher as long as it wasn't physical. Still, the woman said she was "stung"  that her hubby was having such sexual conversations with the chatbot "almost every night" — and even more so when he added that he talked to it for hours about non-sexual subjects too.
Were he having those conversations with a human woman, that would technically be within the bounds of their relationship's rules. But for whatever reason, it seemed to bother the OP worse that her spouse was having his affair with a chatbot.
"I know he’s gonna say it’s not a big deal no matter what," she wrote, "and I think this is what will upset me the most."
Does the woman have a right to be upset? It depends on the nitty-gritty of her interpretation of her agreement with her husband, which is why ongoing communication is a <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-wisdom-of-anger/202410/building-a-successful-open-relationship">staple of successful open relationships</a>.
That's important, because as Cohen points out, the situation represents a gray area. Is phone sex with an AI crossing the line into the "physical intimacy" with outside partners that they left off the table? It's a head-scratcher, and different reasonable people may well come to different conclusions.
"What one partner views as engaging with AI in a completely acceptable way, another may view as cheating," the therapist told HuffPost. "This is something that must be discussed, so that both partners are aware of how the other feels."
"People that are involved in emotional cheating are sharing experiences with another (in this case AI) at the expense of sharing these moments, memories, or insights with their partners," Cohen said. "This can create a distance between partners."
It's also worth noting that when they first married, there was no way the woman could have expected the "emotional cheating" clause in her relationship — one that sounds pretty suspicious, or at least like a slippery slope — to include an AI chatbot, because such technology was neither widespread nor sophisticated at the time. And even if she had, those boundaries can change — as the OP noted, she'd also been upset when finding out her husband had been whacking it to porn earlier in their marriage.
"It is important that both partners want to work on their relationship and that the emotional affair is acknowledged and ended," Cohen told HuffPost. "This becomes more complicated in this case, as the partners may have different beliefs as to whether cheating has occurred."
More on chatbot relationships: <a href="https://futurism.com/body-image-chatgpt-advice">Women With Body Image Issues Are Asking ChatGPT Something Terrible</a>

Good Time Call

"I know he’s gonna say it’s not a big deal."

Hanky Panky With Naughty AI Still Counts as Cheating, Therapist Says

The 12-year campaign to free Ross Ulbricht — the criminal mastermind behind the Silk Road, the original crypto-enabled dark web mail-order-drug emporium — finally ended in January, when newly-minted second term president Donald Trump <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/nx-s1-5270051/trump-pardons-dark-web-marketplace-creator-ross-ulbricht">officially pardoned</a> the bitcoin criminal.
Now, Ulbricht is picking up where he left off, getting his first taste of a world he left behind in 2013 when a federal judge <a href="https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ross-ulbricht-aka-dread-pirate-roberts-sentenced-life-federal-prison-creating">sentenced him</a> to two counts of life in prison, plus 40 years without parole.
In sum, Ulbricht's feeling some culture shock. Taking the stage at the <a href="https://decrypt.co/322898/ross-ulbricht-speaks-at-bitcoin-2025-you-didnt-forget-me">Bitcoin 2025 conference</a> in Las Vegas this week, the drug kingpin was agog at the piles of kitschy tech products that had passed him by.
"When I walked out of prison a few months ago, I’d never seen a drone, used AI, or tried VR. I hadn’t even chatted with AI," Ulbricht marveled. "Now it's all hitting me at once — the freedom, the technology, the fact that I have a future again."
He also basked in the glow of the crypto community's love — a parasocial following that lavished his <a href="https://freeross.org/support/">clemency petition</a> with over 600,000 signatures and an astonishing number of right-libertarian micro-celebrity endorsements.
"You didn't abandon me. You didn't forget me. You wrote me letters. You raised money for my defense. When I was silenced, you spoke up against the slander and the smears," the former dope baron lauded.
Keep in mind, this wasn't a political activist jailed for <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/28/mahmoud-khalil-ruling-deportation-unconstitutional-00373865">protesting an unjust war</a>, or a <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-podcast-with-9cd">whistleblower</a> whose life was destroyed after revealing a massive corporate fraud scheme.
This is a guy who made millions selling drugs to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/teens-posting-photos-of-drugs-from-silk-road-2013-8">teenagers</a> and communities <a href="https://www.jmir.org/2021/2/e24486/">ravaged by the opioid crisis</a>, resulting in at least <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32480601">six overdose deaths</a> that we know of. (Not to mention the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-bitcoin-trial/u-s-details-accused-silk-road-operators-murder-for-hire-plots-idUSL1N0VC2FO20150202/">hitmen he tried to hire</a> to take out his enemies, though he was unsuccessful.)
At its peak in 2013, Ulbricht's Silk Road saw an estimated <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0955395915000110">daily connected user base</a> of 5.5 million. In just two years, it processed some $1.2 billion in illicit sales, according to <a href="https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/hsi-seizes-biggest-anonymous-drug-black-market-website-and-assists-arrest-operator">the Department of Homeland Security</a>.
Through transaction fees, the service generated over $80 million worth of Bitcoin. Authorities in 2014 called it the "most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the internet."
Of course, Ulbricht's saving grace isn't some ethical dilemma Trump has over incarceration or judicial mishandling, but the fact that he built Silk Road off the then-nascent blockchain. That single fact has cemented his status as a crypto superstar.
For context, out of the 1.2 million citizens incarcerated in the US, over 360,000 of them face charges of nonviolent <a href="https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html">drug possession</a>.
In 2023, there were roughly <a href="https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads">870,000 arrests</a> for drug-related charges, the vast majority, or 87.8 percent of which were for drug possession — in other words, for carrying an impossibly tiny fraction of the volume that passed through Ulbricht's drug empire every minute.
With his new lease on life, Ulbricht plans on paying it forward — not as an advocate for carceral reform or prison abolition, but to the crypto community of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047235224001223">get-rich-quick schemers</a> and <a href="https://www.tipranks.com/news/crypto-scams-are-quietly-draining-seniors-life-savings-heres-how-to-stop-it">granny scammers</a>.
"With so much speed and chaos, it’s more important than ever to stay true to our principles," he told the crowd of cryptobros. "If we agree that we deserve freedom and that [crypto] decentralization secures it, we can stand together. Have each other’s backs, as you had mine. Freedom, decentralization, unity — stay true to these, and the future is ours."
More on crypto: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/bitcoin-spa-mold-uti">Visitors At This Bitcoin-Heated Spa Are Complaining About Mold and UTIs</a>

Forget Me Not

"You never forgot me. You gave me hope."

Suddenly Freed From Prison, Silk Road Founder Stunned by Advancements in World Since 2013

Recent research has linked <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-078078">Pfizer's widely-used Depo-Provera birth control shot</a> to massively increased risk of developing brain tumors — and hundreds of women are suing the pharmaceutical giant over it.
According to a <a href="https://www.stocktitan.net/news/PFE/hearing-against-pfizer-set-for-30-may-in-contraceptive-depo-provera-iw61tx0oop7o.html">press release filed on behalf</a> of the roughly 400 plaintiffs in the class action suit, the lawsuit claims that Pfizer and other companies that made generic versions of the injectable contraceptive knew of the link between the shot and the dangerous tumors, but didn't properly warn users.
The suit follows a study <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-078078">published by the British Medical Journal</a> last year that found that people who took the progestin-based shot for a year or more were up to 5.6 times more likely to develop meningioma, a slow-building brain tumor that forms, <a href="https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17858-meningioma">per the Cleveland Clinic</a>, on the meninges, or layers of tissue that covers the brain and spinal cord.
Though Pfizer attached warning labels about meningioma to Depo-Provera <a href="https://whlaw.com/mass-torts/depo-provera/">sold in Canada in 2015</a> and <a href="https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/files/pil.6721.pdf">the UK</a>, <a href="https://www.aboutlawsuits.com/depo-provera-lawsuit/depo-provera-brain-tumor-warnings-added-drug-label-europe/">Europe</a>, and <a href="https://pi-pil-repository.sahpra.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Depo-Provera-100mg-approved-PI-21Jan2025.pdf">South Africa</a> after the 2024 study was published, no such label was deployed in the United States — a failure which according to the lawsuit is "inconsistent [with] global safety standards."
In an <a href="https://www.drugwatch.com/beyond-side-effects/mothers-meningioma-battle-after-using-depo-provera/">interview with the website DrugWatch</a>, one of the suit's plaintiffs, who was identified by the initials TC, said that she had been "told how great Depo-Provera was" and decided to start it after an unplanned pregnancy that occurred when she'd taken the <a href="https://www.verywellhealth.com/ortho-tri-cyclen-lo-906834">since-discontinued birth control pill</a> Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo.
"I thought it would be more reliable and convenient since I wouldn’t have to take it daily," TC told the site, referencing the four annual injections Depo-Provera requires. "I had no idea it would lead to such serious health problems."
After being on the contraceptive shot for three years — and experiencing intense headaches, months-long uterine bleeding, and weight gain — the woman finally consulted her doctor and was diagnosed with meningioma. She's since been undergoing treatment and experienced some relief, but even that experience has been "physically and emotionally draining" because she has to get regular MRIs to monitor the tumor, which likely isn't fatal but still greatly affects her quality of life.
"It’s a constant worry that the tumor might grow," TC said, "and the appointments feel never-ending."
That fear was echoed by others who <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14755521/contraceptive-jab-linked-brain-tumours.html">spoke to the Daily Mail</a> about their meningioma diagnoses after taking Depo-Provera. Unlike TC, Andrea Faulks of Alabama hadn't been on the shots for years when she learned of her brain tumors, which caused her years of anguish.
Faulks told the British website that she'd begun taking the medication back in 1993, the <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8492647/">year after it was approved</a> by the FDA in the United States. She stopped taking it only a few years later, but spent decades having splitting headaches and experiencing dizziness and tremors. After being dismissed by no fewer than six doctors, the woman finally got an MRI last summer and learned that she had a brain tumor — and is now undergoing radiation to shrink it after all this time.
"I know this is something I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life, as long as I live," Faulks told the Daily Mail.
Currently, the class action case against Pfizer on behalf of women like Faulks and TC is in its earliest stages as attorneys representing those hundreds of women with brain tumors start working to make them whole.
Even if they receive adequate payouts, however, that money won't take away their suffering, or give them back the years of their life lost to tumors they should have been warned about.
More on injectables: <a href="https://futurism.com/medvi-ai-ozempic">This Sleazy GLP-1 Prescription Site Is Using Deepfaked "Before-and-After" Photos of Fake Patients, and Running Ads Showing AI-Generated Ozempic Boxes</a>

Tumor Has It

Rx/Medicines

The pharmaceutical giant allegedly knew about the risks... but didn't warn patients.

400 Women Are Suing Pfizer Over Birth Control Shot That Allegedly Gave Them Brain Tumors

It may be time to suck it up — and we don't just mean the carbon in the atmosphere. 
No, we're talking about reckoning with the possibility that our attempts at capturing the greenhouse gas to stave off climate disaster are already hopelessly behind schedule, <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2482307-at-this-rate-carbon-dioxide-removal-will-never-matter-for-the-climate/">New Scientist </a><a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2482307-at-this-rate-carbon-dioxide-removal-will-never-matter-for-the-climate/">reports</a>, if <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/05/29/15degrees-celsius-world-meteorological-organization/">they're not in vain entirely</a>.
To illustrate, here're some simple numbers. The CO2 removal industry expects to hit a milestone of removing one million metric tons of CO2 this year. And companies across the globe have bought carbon credits to remove 27 million more, according to data from CDR.fyi cited in the reporting (more on these carbon credit schemes in a moment).
That sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. As New Scientist notes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the leading authority on these issues — concluded in a <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-removal-unavoidable-as-climate-dangers-grow-new-ipcc-report-says/">2022 report</a> that we need to be removing up to 16 billion tons of carbon, not millions, each year to keep the rise in global temperature from <a href="https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement">exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius</a> (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the middle of the century, past which the most drastic effects of climate change are believed to be irreversible.
"It's not scaling up as fast as it would need to if we are going to reach multiple gigatons by 2050," Robert Höglund at Marginal Carbon, a climate consultancy based in Sweden, told the magazine. 
Carbon capture is not the be-all and end-all. The fact remains that humanity needs to drastically reduce its emissions, which probably means reorganizing society — or at least its energy production and consumption — as we know it. Simply removing the CO2 that's already there is more like a band-aid that buys us a little time; eventually, we'll need to rip it off.
For these reasons, some critics fear that carbon capture — and even more drastic interventions, like <a href="https://futurism.com/scientists-preparing-experiments-dim-sun">attempting to dim the Sun</a> — could distract from the climate change's systemic causes. But there's a lot of <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/billions-facilities-carbon-removal">enthusiasm for the approach</a> all the same, both from scientists and investors. The IPCC acknowledged in its 2022 report that carbon removal was "<a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-removal-unavoidable-as-climate-dangers-grow-new-ipcc-report-says/">unavoidable</a>" — as in, essential to meeting climate targets.
One popular method of carbon removal is called <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/us-direct-air-capture-facility">direct air capture</a>, which involves sucking the carbon straight from the air using massive industrial facilities. A more circuitous approach that's gaining steam involves <a href="https://futurism.com/seacure-carbon-ocean">extracting CO2 out of the ocean</a>, freeing up room for the world's largest carbon sink to passively absorb even more of the greenhouse gas. 
All of these initiatives, though, are basically just getting off the ground. And the corporate investment, which once promised <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/billions-facilities-carbon-removal">billions of dollars in cash</a>, seems to be cooling. More than 90 percent of all carbon removal credits sold this year were bought by a single company, Microsoft, New Scientist notes, probably to gloss over its <a style="cursor: pointer !important; user-select: none !important;" href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-datacenters-worse">egregious energy bill it's accrued from building loads of AI datacenters</a>.
This also touches on the fact that the practice of buying carbon credits can be used as a means of corporate greenwashing. By paying to another firm to "certify" that they will remove a certain amount of carbon at some undetermined point in the future, a company can report a greener carbon balance sheet without actually reducing its emissions.
In any case, staking the industry's hopes on corporate munificence is a dicey prospect indeed.
"I have been raising the alarm for about a year and a half," Eli Mitchell-Larson at Carbon Gap, a UK carbon dioxide removal advocacy organisation, told New Scientist. "If we're just waiting for the waves of free philanthropic money from corporations to fill a hole on their sustainability report, we're not really going to solve the problem."
More on climate change: <a href="https://futurism.com/scientists-wealthy-global-warming">Scientists Just Found Who's Causing Global Warming</a>