The next time you call a car dealership, the voice on the other end may not belong to a human.
As <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/tomas-ai-voice-agents-have-taken-off-at-car-dealerships-and-attracted-funding-from-a16z/">TechCrunch reports</a>, the founders of Toma, an AI voice agent startup, pivoted from pitching to healthcare and finance companies to fielding calls from automotive salespeople desperate to offload some of their labor to AI agents.
To hone their product, founders Monik Pamecha and Anthony Krivonos visited a dozen dealerships in the states of Oklahoma and Mississippi — no word on why they chose those specific locales — to get up close and personal with potential clients.
Along with racking up folksy anecdotes about being fed home-cooked dinners and getting car grease on their clothes, TechCrunch reports that the learnings from the tour ended up attracting $17 million during its Andreessen Horowitz-led fundraising round for its software, which handles customer sales calls, schedules repair appointments, and takes parts orders.
"We invest in a lot of the next-generation of vertical AI companies, a lot of the best founders have just lived and breathed with these customers to understand what’s going on under the hood," a16z partner Seema Amble told the site. "No pun intended."
Described <a href="https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-toma/">by the venture capital firm</a> as a "fully integrated, AI-powered software suite designed to help dealerships operate more efficiently," Toma's product offering differs from the countless <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/ai-assistant">AI voice agent startups</a> cropping up primarily because of its automotive focus.
The company has some competition. According to a study <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2024/11/19/survey-reveals-dealers-are-boosting-ai-use-to-boost-revenue/">commissioned last year by Fullpath</a>, a sales data platform, 80 percent of the 200 dealerships contacted said they were already using AI — and fully 100 percent of those who use the technology said they saw increasing revenues after doing so.
Notably, that study didn't break down how those dealerships were using AI, and Toma appears to be filling a specific hole that call centers across the world have already sought to plug: replacing human agents with AI.
Yossi Levi, an automotive influencer who runs the "Car Dealership Guy" website — and who also invested in Toma — suggested that AI voice agents may be better equipped to handle the "ebbs and flows" of call volumes.
"Sometimes you’re overwhelmed with demand," Levi told TechCrunch. "Other times there’s not enough demand, and matching staffing and properly training that staff for a consistent experience is just not an easy thing to do."
The dealership dude insisted that Toma helps car dealers "standardize that process, and deliver a richer customer experience that is consistent." We can't say for sure how speaking to an AI affects the satisfaction of the customers on the other line — or whether its product has the same propensity for <a href="https://simmering.dev/blog/agentic-ai/">getting it wrong</a> as other AI agents.
A cautionary tale for anyone rolling it out, though: remember the Chevy dealership that deployed an AI, only to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-dealership-ai">become alarmed when a customer</a> talked it into selling new vehicle for just $1?
More on agentic AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/professors-company-ai-agents">Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You'll Never Guess What Happened</a>

Special Agent

Do androids dream of electric cars?

Car Dealerships Are Replacing Phone Staff With AI Voice Agents

For years, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/1/12/11588720/in-first-public-comments-self-driving-car-ceo-urges-automakers-to-buy">tech entrepreneurs</a> have been preaching that self-driving cars will soon deliver us from our hellscape of vehicular crashes and horrible, fiery deaths.
Among the biggest advocates for the safety of autonomous vehicles has been Elon Musk, whose promises of a fully self-driving Tesla have been <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-executive-fsd">wearing on</a> for a decade.
Despite having provided no proof that Teslas can operate at a level required for "autonomous driving," the tech mogul's robotaxi service is <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/03/tesla-robotaxi-launch-in-austin-has-musk-playing-catch-up-in-hometown.html">mere days away</a> from going live in Austin.
Already, driverless Model Ys are testing out <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-28/tesla-targets-june-12-launch-of-robotaxi-service-in-austin">Austin-area roads</a> full of living, breathing humans — which is why it's all the more horrifying that a self-driving Tesla was responsible for the brutal death of a Phoenix-area grandmother.
The fatal incident happened in 2023, and was the first pedestrian death attributed to a Tesla's self-driving software.
Bloomberg <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driving-crash/">recently released</a> the crash footage, which shows a Tesla screaming down the highway into a blinding Arizona sunset. Moments before the fatality, the vehicle reacts to a man waving it down by veering to the left, though failing to slow down.
The vehicle then adjusts to the right, straight onto the 71-year old woman, who was helping direct traffic after a previous accident shut down the highway ahead. Though there was a driver in the Tesla at the time who should have intervened, it's not known whether they were implicated in the woman's death.
Though all carmakers are required to <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-order-crash-reporting">report any incident</a> where self-driving software is involved, Tesla took seven months to submit the crash details to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA.)
The fatality brought about a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-18/tesla-s-full-self-driving-faces-us-defect-probe-after-fatality">federal investigation</a> into Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" software, which in spite of its name requires constant supervision, and has been found responsible for <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-opens-new-investigation-into-teslas-full-self-driving-system-after-fatal-crash">multiple crashes</a> in the past few years.
One of the major issues with Tesla's self-driving software is the sensor it uses to detect other objects. Instead of a LiDAR system like Tesla's ascendant competitor Waymo, Musk has chosen to barrel ahead with visual cameras alone — even as evidence grows suggesting some <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-mistake-full-self-driving-cameras">major safety flaws</a> with that strategy.
Meanwhile, Tesla is <a href="https://www.tesla.com/careers/search/job/mechanical-design-engineer-sensor-cleaning-243189">actively hiring engineers</a> to work on "sensor cleaning systems," presumably to patch over the sensor issues that led to a combined <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-opens-new-investigation-into-teslas-full-self-driving-system-after-fatal-crash">467 crashes</a> by 2024.
None of it bodes well for the company's Austin takeover, which Tesla's own <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-analysis-robotaxi-musk">internal documents</a> anticipate will be a disaster.
Bryant Walker Smith, a lawyer and transportation engineer, told Bloomberg that "they are claiming they will be imminently able to do something — true automated driving — that all evidence suggests they still can’t do safely."
And everyone on the roads will be a test subject.
More on self-driving cars: <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-cybertruck-fsd-gta">Watch in Horror as Cybertruck Driver Plays "Grand Theft Auto" While Screaming Down Highway on Self-Driving Mode</a>

Slow Your Roll

Gruesome.

Terrifying Footage Shows Self-Driving Tesla Get Confused by the Sun, Mow Down Innocent Grandmother

Researchers in China have developed a technique to give lithium-ion battery cells a second shot at life. Delivered as an injection, it significantly extends the cells' lifespan and has them perform almost like they're young again, the team report in a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08465-y">study</a> published in the prestigious journal Nature.
"If we can give an injection to a sick person to help them recover," coauthor Yue Gao, a chemist at Fudan University in Shanghai, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reviving-dead-lithium-ion-batteries-with-an-ai-derived-electrolyte-solution/">told Scientific American</a>, "why can't we have a magic potion for drained batteries, too?"
The technique could be a breakthrough in <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/millions-electric-cars-are-coming-what-happens-all-dead-batteries">reducing lithium battery waste</a>, one of the major blemishes in electric vehicles' promise of a greener alternative to gas-guzzlers, which is only going to become more challenged as EV adoption rises. The vehicles' immense batteries are difficult to recycle, and if not disposed of properly, leak toxic chemicals that seep back into the ground. While recycling will remain paramount, the highly specialized facilities that are needed to process spent batteries <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/06/27/nx-s1-5019454/ev-battery-recycling-us">are still being built-up</a>. 
Typically, an EV's lithium-ion battery pack will last eight to twelve years before it's considered "dead," meaning it's fallen below 80 percent of its original capacity. That's a decent lifespan, but replacing them is painful: as SciAm notes, the battery makes up roughly <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/battery-test-race-work-out-what-used-evs-are-really-worth-2023-10-23/">40 percent</a> of a new EV's cost, putting a huge economic strain on owners.
But what if you didn't have to shell out thousands of dollars for a replacement? From the get-go, Gao and his team wanted to find a molecule that could deliver fresh lithium ions to moribund battery cells. 
"We had no idea what kinds of molecules could do that job or what their chemical structures would be, so we used machine learning to help us," Chihao Zhao, a researcher at Fudan University, who was part of Gao's team but not an author on the new study, told SciAm.
The carefully configured machine learning model recommended three candidates, and the most promising one was a salt called lithium trifluoromethanesulfinate. When dissolved in an electrolyte solution, the researchers found, the salt released lithium ions that flowed back into a battery's degraded cells. 
Followup experiments showed that injecting the solution into a battery cell could restore it back to 96 percent capacity, extending its lifespan to nearly 12,000 charge cycles. That's a dramatic boost. For reference, EV batteries are designed to last for 1,500 to 2,000 charge cycles.
"The team's work is revolutionary because it provides a new idea to reuse end-of-life batteries," Jiangong Zhu of Tongji University in Shanghai, who researches EV batteries and was not involved in the study, told SciAm.
The researchers are the first to admit, however, that their miracle injection isn't quite ready to hit the market.
"We have only conducted experiments on cells, and we need to find a way to apply it onto a whole battery pack," Gao told SciAM. One battery pack might contain thousands of cells.
More on EVs: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/general-motors-ev-battery">General Motors Unveils Their "Groundbreaking" New EV Battery</a>

Fountain of Youth

"If we can give an injection to a sick person to help them recover, why can't we have a magic potion for drained batteries, too?"

Scientists Say They've Created an Injection That Makes Aging Batteries Charge Like They're Young Again

More and more young people are <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/14/more-than-half-of-gen-z-want-to-be-influencers-but-its-constant.html">gunning to become influencers</a> — but certain personality types appear more likely to pursue it as a career than others, which could explain a lot about the <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/kai-cenat-streamer-university-what-happened.html">chaotic and outrageous industry</a>.
It's a worthwhile line of inquiry. Back in 2019, a <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/more-children-dream-of-being-youtubers-than-astronauts-lego-says.html">Lego-sponsored survey</a> found that among 3,000 kids in the US, UK, and China, a full third said they wanted to be influencers, while only 11 percent indicated an interest in becoming an astronaut.
What does that immensely powerful trend mean for society? In a new study published <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0736585325000103?via%3Dihub">in the journal Telematics and Informatics</a>, researchers from Poland's University of Wrocław and Oxford found that young people who are extraverted, self-involved, and — quelle surprise — dramatic were more likely to aspire to being an influencer than their more introverted and calmer counterparts.
After recruiting nearly 800 participants aged 16 and 17 — roughly half of whom were Polish, with the other half based in the United Kingdom — the researchers posed a battery of questions to their teen subjects about their career goals and their dream jobs.
The participants were also given questionnaires that measured how strongly they exhibit the "<a href="https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests">Big Five</a>" personality traits — openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — as well as how histrionic, or dramatic, they are.
As the researchers found, those with heightened extraversion, narcissism, and histrionics — a tendency to be dramatic and expressive about it, basically — were more likely to be interested in the influencer life. Those traits correlate to a <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-extroversion-2795994">desire to be seen</a> and <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-narcissism/202501/why-do-narcissists-need-other-people-to-validate-them">validated by others</a> in much the same way as with <a href="https://www.americantheatre.org/2024/09/06/how-to-tell-if-youre-a-theatre-kid/">theater kids</a> — suggesting, perhaps, that the student thespians of today may be the influencers of tomorrow.
Though there's been some research into <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-20911-001">how audiences perceive</a> the personalities of content creators, this study appears to be the first that looks into the traits the drive people to become influencers — or wannabe influencer, at least, since the career is <a href="https://www.nssmag.com/en/fashion/29822/influencer-failure-tiktok-instagram">anything but a slam dunk</a> for most who attempt it.
More on personality: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/hawk-tuah-girl-horrified-crypto">Hawk Tuah Girl Says She’s Horrified by What Happened With Her Crypto Launch</a>

Creator Brain

This is kind of sad.

Scientists Figured Out the Personality Traits of Influencers, and It Could Explain a Lot

<h2>Multi-Platinum</h2>
Researchers say there could be over $1 trillion worth of platinum lurking under the surface of the Moon — a major lunar bounty waiting to be mined.
As detailed in a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0032063325000960?via%3Dihub">paper</a> published in the journal Planetary and Space Science, independent researcher Jayanth Chennamangalam and his team determined that out of around 1.3 million craters lining the Moon's surface with diameters greater than 0.6 miles across, almost 6,500 were created by asteroids that contain commercial quantities of platinum, among other valuable ores like palladium or iridium.
To the researchers, the draw isn't just the promise of immense wealth; the proceeds of mining these ores could be used to explore space.
"Today, astronomy is done to satiate our curiosity," Chennamangalam <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2482664-trillion-dollars-worth-of-platinum-waiting-to-be-mined-on-the-moon/">told New Scientist</a>, a surprisingly cynical statement that's bound to raise eyebrows among researchers. "It has very few practical applications and is mostly paid for by taxpayer money, meaning that research funding is at the mercy of governmental policy."
"If we can monetise space resources — be it on the Moon or on asteroids — private enterprises will invest in the exploration of the solar system," he added.
<h2>Moon Miner</h2>
Chennamangalam, who holds a PhD in astrophysics and was a postdoc at the University of Oxford, found that there could be a "lot more craters on the moon with ore-bearing asteroidal remnants than there are accessible ore-bearing asteroids."
Mining these craters would be significantly simpler than traveling to distant asteroids, which most of the time don't have enough gravity for mining operations.
But whether plundering the Moon for profit would even be legal remains a far murkier question. As New Scientist points out, the Outer Space Treaty, which was signed in 1967, sets strict rules for space resource mining, stopping any nation from claiming or occupying the "Moon and other celestial bodies."
However, experts say those rules could still allow for governments to find loopholes and still claim licensing rights to extract resources.
In an effort to ratify international rules, the US established the Artemis Accords, a <a href="https://futurism.com/nasa-rules-space">non-binding framework</a>. However, neither China nor Russia has signed it, leaving its authority murky.
In short, the race to the surface of the Moon is on — a tight competition that could be decided between the US and China by the <a href="https://futurism.com/nasa-mars-rockets-2026-elon-musk">end of this decade</a>, especially if a fortune in precious metals is at play.
More on the Moon: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-starship-improvements-failure">Elon Boasts of Huge Starship Improvements Immediately Before It Blows Up Spectacularly</a>

Lunar Payday

The race is on.

Scientists Say There's Over a Trillion Dollars of Platinum Waiting to Be Extracted From the Moon's Craters

The Pentagon's real-life "X-Files" office has uncovered an inconvenient truth about military officials spreading UFO disinformation to unsuspecting Americans and coworkers alike.
As the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinformation-45376f7e">Wall Street Journal reports,</a> the Defense Department's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) uncovered an anecdote from an Air Force colonel who trolled people near Area 51 with doctored photos of flying saucers.
Back in 2023, the colonel in question admitted to AARO investigators that he had, some 43 years prior, given the photos to a bartender at a local pub near the classified military base. The photos went up and the incident was added to the lengthy lore surrounding the base, but as the ranking officer revealed, the whole gambit was meant to distract from a secret weapons program being developed at the <a href="https://www.space.com/area-51-what-is-it">massively-classified Air Force base</a>.
In interviews with dozens of former and current officials, as well as contractors and scientists who have worked with the AARO, the WSJ learned that the Pentagon repeatedly played into conspiracy theories surrounding what the government refers to as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — and those campaigns weren't limited to the unsuspecting public.
Perhaps the most jarring of the AARO discoveries shared with the newspaper is the suggestion that higher-ups in the Air Force would haze new commanders by telling them that they were being inducted into a secretive program called "Yankee Blue."
The phony project, according to since-retired AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick, involved the reverse-engineering of alien crafts — a key tenet of some of the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/whistleblowers-government-recovered-alien-tech-ufos">more outlandish claims</a> from <a href="https://futurism.com/us-recovered-non-human-vehicles">UFO whistleblowers</a> in recent years. After being told about their "induction," the officers were warned to never speak of the program again, lest they be jailed or even executed.
Multiple officers told Kirkpatrick they had never revealed what they'd been told, even to their spouses, out of fear of the retribution with which they'd been threatened. Others still didn't learn that they'd been subjected to a cruel joke until 2023, when the the DOD — which acknowledged the program's existence to the WSJ — banned the hazing ritual that had apparently been going on for decades.
Unfortunately, these shocking revelations aren't all that surprising. As much as we want to believe the truth is out there, it's far more believable that military officials would lie to the public — and to their subordinates — about alien tech than it would be for the Pentagon to actually have such artifacts in its possession.
More on UAPs: <a href="https://futurism.com/military-whistleblower-ufo-crop-photo">A Military Whistleblower Showed a Photo of an Allegedly Huge "Disc-Shaped" Object, But There's an Incredibly Obvious Explanation</a>

Deny Everything

Unfortunately, this isn't that surprising. 

Air Force Colonel Gave Out Photos of Flying Saucers Near Area 51

Fresh on the heels of <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-musk-returns">Elon Musk's dubious return to Tesla</a>, the head of the company's humanoid robot program is departing — but he swears the decision was his alone.
According to an <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-06/tesla-s-leader-of-optimus-humanoid-robot-program-leaves-company?srnd=homepage-asia&amp;sref=YfHlo0rL">insider who spoke to Bloomberg</a>, Milan Kovac, the head of engineering for the Optimus robot program, informed colleagues at the end of this past work week — the same one that saw Musk and president Donald Trump <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-trump-epstein-files">explode at each other</a> on social media — that he would be leaving effectively immediately.
Soon after, Kovac posted a lengthy and heartfelt <a href="https://x.com/_milankovac_/status/1931097888995807554?s=46&amp;t=8WGVwgjrrPg1RySsxhJs0A">missive on X</a> about his alleged choice to end his nine-year tenure at Tesla, where he initially worked on artificial intelligence programs like Autopilot before transitioning to the lead Optimus engineer in 2022.
"This week, I’ve had to make the most difficult decision of my life and will be moving out of my position," the ex-Tesla-er tweeted. "I’ve been far away from home for too long, and will need to spend more time with family abroad."
He also included an unusual disclaimer.
"I want to make it clear that this is the only reason, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything else," Kovac continued. "My support for [Musk] and the team is ironclad — Tesla team forever."
The gentleman, it seems, doth protest too much — and Musk's response doesn't inspire confidence about the veracity of Kovac's claim, either.
"Milan, thank you for your outstanding contribution to Tesla over the past decade," the billionaire, who himself was newly sacked, <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1931106237049151880">replied</a>. "It was an honor working with you."
"Enjoy the time with family," Musk wrote. (The "and don't let the door hit you on your way out" might have been implied.)
While there's no concrete evidence suggesting that Kovac's resignation was forced, there are plenty of context clues that make you wonder.
Beyond Musk's no-good very bad week, Kovac's leadership of Tesla's humanoid robot program has left much to be desired. Despite some seemingly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2vj0WcvH5c">impressive prototypes</a> — one of which was <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-robots-remotely-controlled-analyst">actually remote-controlled</a>, and another of which was <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-sped-up-video-optimus-robots">made to look cooler</a> via sneaky video editing tricks — Optimus doesn't appear anywhere near ready for prime time in any economically viable sense, regardless of what <a href="https://futurism.com/former-tesla-robotics-boss-elon-musk-optimus">Musk claims</a> on investor calls about the robotic Hail Mary.
If Kovac is telling the truth about his departure, it would make sense for him, as a seeming true Tesla believer, to resign of his own volition because he failed to deliver a bona fide humanoid robot.
Given <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-cutting-off-nasa">how volatile</a> his now-ex-boss is, however, there's a pretty good chance the decision to leave was not Kovac's alone.
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-messages-robotaxi-rollout-austin">Tesla Seems Terrified These Messages About Its Robotaxi Rollout Will Be Released</a>

For Sure Dude

"I want to make it clear that this is the only reason, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything else."

The Head of Tesla’s Humanoid Robot Program Says That He DEFINITELY Wasn't Fired and Is Only Leaving to Spend Time With His Family, Not Because Elon Musk Is on the Warpath

You might have heard the term "private equity" thrown around lately.
Private equity, or "<a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/termite-capitalism-how-private-equity-undermining-economy/">termite capitalism</a>," as it's been ironically called, is a sweeping term for a massive industry built around buying and flipping established companies. These businesses can be just about anything — <a href="https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/private-equity-is-out-of-control-and-looting-america-this-prosecutor-says-we-can-fix-it">municipal water utilities</a>, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/25/red-lobster-tgi-fridays-bankruptcies-private-equity.html">chain restaurants</a>, <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/labor-organizers-launch-a-new-model-for-the-fight-against-private-equity/">bottling plants</a>, and even <a href="https://medicareadvocacy.org/when-private-equity-takes-over-nursing-facilities-residents-beware/">retirement homes</a>.
The strategy is largely extractive. When someone flips an abandoned house, they're theoretically making structural repairs and quality-of-life updates, in the hopes of selling for more than the cost of the whole project. At its worst, private equity <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/1/6/21024740/private-equity-taylor-swift-toys-r-us-elizabeth-warren">does the opposite</a>: taking over healthy companies, selling off their assets and laying off employees en masse — hence the "termite" moniker.
Now, venture capitalist and tech billionaire Elad Gil is doing something that sounds awfully similar — except that unlike the largely technophobic private equity space, according to a <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/01/early-ai-investor-elad-gil-finds-his-next-big-bet-ai-powered-rollups/">recent profile by TechCrunch</a>, he's been using his immense fortune to buy up companies and reshape them to run using AI.
The scheme looks like this: Gil, or a firm he backs, acquires a stable, white-collar business with a healthy cashflow, like a law firm or a marketing agency. Then, Gil "helps them scale through AI" — <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonsnyder/2025/02/12/ai-reset-layoffs-rto-and-the-new-realities-of-work/">techno corpospeak</a> for "lay off a bunch of workers and automate their labor with AI" — using the proceeds to buy other firms to add to the empire. Think Sam Bankman-Fried meets "The Blob," and you're not far off.
Overall, it's not really a new strategy. "<a href="https://raincatcher.com/roll-up-strategy/">Roll-ups</a>" of small firms into one conglomerate are pretty common in private equity, even if they have some pretty <a href="https://aflcio.org/about/advocacy/legislative-alerts/letter-opposing-consolidation-and-growing-role-private-equity">devastating consequences</a> for workers and their communities.
By embracing AI, the billionaire insists, "you can increase the margins dramatically and create very different types of businesses." Gil lists tasks like <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-summarizing-research">text manipulation</a>, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/spotify-ai-music">audio</a>, <a href="https://futurism.com/new-smith-eating-spaghetti-video-sounds">video</a>, <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-researchers-coding-fail">coding</a>, and <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-sales-bot-11x">sales</a> as key tasks generative AI can supposedly help streamline — all things it's notoriously <a href="https://futurism.com/klarna-openai-humans-ai-back">awful at</a>, by the way, so you could look at the whole project as a huge bet that the tech will improve dramatically enough for it to succeed.
"There used to be these technology-enabled roll-ups 10 years ago, and most of them kind of ended up being not really that much of a user of technology," Gil told TC.
"It was kind of like a thin veneer painted on to increase the valuation of the company," he said without a hint of irony. "I think in the case of AI, you can actually radically change the cost structure of these things."
In reality, <a href="https://nextword.substack.com/p/ai-tech-enabled-roll-ups-are-a-dumb">experts say</a> it's more likely that competition in the tech space and poor performance by AI models make this strategy a bust. But hey, billionaires know best.
More on startups: <a href="https://futurism.com/venture-capitalist-andreessen-jobs">Top Venture Capitalist Says AI Will Replace Pretty Much All Jobs Except His, Which Relies on His Unique Genius</a>

Rolled Up

Where have I heard this one before?

A Billionaire Is Buying Entire Businesses and Converting Them to Run With AI

This week, president Donald Trump and Elon Musk's bad blood burst into public view — but apparently, it had been brewing behind the scenes for some time.
In a massive exposé looking behind the curtain of the year's biggest breakup, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/us/politics/trump-musk-split-nasa.html">New York Times revealed</a> that the pair was already squabbling immediately after Musk's now-infamous farewell party — yes, the one that Musk showed up to with a <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-black-eye-drug-claims">mysterious black eye</a> and a bizarre excuse.
According to White House insiders who requested that the NYT keep them anonymous, Trump learned just ahead of Musk's now-infamous final Oval Office meeting last week that aviator Jared Isaacman, the billionaire's pick to lead NASA, had in recent years been a big-time donor to Democrats.
Though many donations are public and easily accessible on <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=jared+isaacman">databases like OpenSecrets</a>, the information in that file was apparently news to the president. After playing nice during Musk's televised farewell, Trump apparently made his displeasure with the situation known.
During the confrontation, Trump read the names out loud — which names, we don't know, because the NYT didn't reveal them — while reportingly shaking his head. This wasn't good, he told Musk.
Attempting to defend his pick, Musk insisted that Isaacman's donations could be spun positively as proof that Trump, himself a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/21/politics/donald-trump-election-democrat">former registered Democrat</a>, was willing to hire people from different political backgrounds.
The president, however, wasn't buying it, and suggested it showed only that the <a href="https://futurism.com/jared-isaacman-spacex-hubble">well-heeled SpaceX customer</a> was a turncoat.
Isaacman's <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-elon-musk-jared-isaacman-nomination-nasa">nomination was ultimately rescinded</a> after that tense exchange at the end of May. And according to the NYT's unnamed insiders, that debacle was the tipping point that took his increasing frustrations with the president to nuclear levels. Within just a few days, Musk began posting about the "<a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1929954109689606359">abomination</a>" that he consider's Trump's 2025 budget and tax proposal to be — and added in an apparent <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-trump-epstein-files">pedophilia allegation</a> for good measure.
The president, to his end, responded publicly to Musk's barbs the only way he knows how: with cruelty and aplomb. Along with <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-calls-terminating-elon-musk-government-contracts">threatening to cancel</a> SpaceX's NASA contracts, Trump allegedly, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/us/politics/trump-tesla-elon-musk.html">per more reporting from the New York Times</a>, decided to sell the cherry-red Tesla he purchased in March "<a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114141854575248527">as a show of support and confidence</a>" for Musk.
More on the Musk-Trump drama: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-trump-doge-slump">Elon and Trump’s Breakup Results In Hilarious Consequences For Dogecoin</a>

Ego Prices

This is when things went off the rails.

Trump Confronted Musk in Private Before Their Blowout Public Fight

Elite athletes <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6007722/2025/01/11/nhl-recovery-tips/">love their ice baths</a>, or "cold plunges." After sweating it out on the court or on the pitch, you slide into a tub of freezing cold water to keep the muscle cramps away.
Lately, the practice has gained popularity in wellness and bodybuilding circles — with the additional step of snapping a photo of yourself to signal that you belong to a higher echelon of physical specimen — but influencer gym bros especially. You know the type: selling you branded protein powders, a program for "INSANE" gainz, and form-fitting Gymshark tees.
But a <a href="https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/abstract/9900/post_exercise_cooling_lowers_skeletal_muscle.781.aspx">new study</a>, published in the journal Medicine &amp; Science in Sports and &amp; Exercise, throws some cold water on the purported benefits of the practice. And hilariously, it seems to produce the exact opposite effects you'd want as a person trying to build muscle.
"It looks like it's not a great idea" to soak in freezing water after lifting weights, lead author Milan Betz, a researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/06/04/cold-plunge-ice-bath-benefits/">told the Washington Post</a>.
Wait, you may ask as a person unfamiliar with the practice, why was microdosing hypothermia a thing in the first place? There are purported benefits, backed by limited science. The biggest upside that <a href="https://theconversation.com/ice-baths-are-popular-for-exercise-recovery-and-general-wellness-but-what-does-the-science-say-250649">research has shown</a> so far is that an icy dip can help with muscle soreness by reducing post-exercise inflammation and flushing out lactates.
That makes it more well-suited for aerobic athletes like runners, soccer players, and swimmers. But anyone training for strength? That's a different story.
As part of the study, the researchers had a dozen healthy young men perform a leg workout, and when they were finished, immediately submerge one leg in a bucket of warm water (80 degrees Fahrenheit), and another leg in a bucket of icy water (30 degrees), for 20 minutes. 
To wrap up, all of them were given a protein shake that contained a biochemical tracer, according to WaPo, allowing the researchers to see where the protein traveled in the volunteers' bloodstreams.
Much of that protein, it seems, may be going to waste. Ultrasound imaging revealed that blood flow in the cold-plunged legs dropped considerably compared to the warm leg — and stayed that way for hours. That constriction, as a result, cut off a lot of protein from reaching the strained leg muscles. Less protein, of course, means fewer gains.
Brad Schoenfeld, a noted exercise scientist at Lehman College in New York known for his bodybuilding advice, co-authored a <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ejsc.12074">2024 meta-analysis</a> which suggested that ice baths could harm hypertrophy. Responding to this latest research, Schoenfeld told WaPo that its findings "provide confirmatory evidence" that a reduction of protein uptake is responsible for these negative effects.
Still, it's not over for ice baths. This was a small study, and one which only focused on one specific approach. The participants plunged immediately after the workout — but most advice out there recommends waiting several hours. Immersion time could be a major factor, too. There could be psychological benefits, and if your personal experience suggests that to be the case, "there’s no reason to change your mind," Benz told WaPo.
That said, Betz recommends that if you're all about gains, you should pass on taking a plunge right after your workout.
More on fitness: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/another-bodybuilder-died-oil-injections">Another Bodybuilder Just Died a Horrible Death</a>