Ever since college dropouts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began pedaling the romantic tale of founding Apple in Jobs' parents' Los Altos garage, college-age tech bros have longed to follow in their footsteps. But there's just one tiny thorn: the "founder's story" of late-night struggles and coffee-fueled breadboarding is mostly a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/steve-wozniak-apple-starting-in-a-garage-is-a-myth#:~:text=The%20commonly%20shared%20tale%20is,myth%2C%E2%80%9D%20Wozniak%20told%20Businessweek.">capitalist fairy tale</a>.
Still, it's a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2025.2471602">mythos</a> tech billionaire overlord Peter Thiel is <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2025.2471602">all too eager</a> to stoke. His empire is built on image — even the stereotypical "<a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/07/peter-thiel-superrich-wealth-inequality-political-influence">evil mastermind</a>" vibe is a carefully groomed persona — which he disseminates across Silicon Valley hopefuls via the almighty <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/09/28/is-peter-thiels-pro-dropout-fellowship-mostly-an-advertisement-for-himself">Thiel Fellowship</a>.
Each year, Thiel selects up to 20 "Thiel fellows" to each receive $200,000 and drop out of college in order to pursuit a tech startup. Though some come straight out of high school, many Thiel fellows historically come from <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-rich-mans-dropout-club/?bc_nonce=vt6om2ildkk65b0bj9t19l&amp;cid=reg_wall_signup">Ivy league schools</a>, which isn't exactly the kind of background that screams "all or nothing."
Thanks to Thiel's massive profile and political influence, a number of Thiel fellows have watched their startups soar to billion dollar valuations. Though tech hopefuls are said to have just <a href="https://www.meridean.org/blog/thiel-fellowship">.01 percent</a> of a chance to snag a Thiel Fellowship, that isn't stopping scores of wannabe founders from dropping out of college anyway.
In a profile of the growing anti-college movement festering in Silicon Valley, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-tech-founders-skipping-college-new-dropping-out-palantir-2025-6">Business Insider's Julia Hornstein</a> sat down with a number of young dropouts to figure out just what the hell is going on.
Sebastian Tan, one of over 500 students who applied for an internship at Thiel's surveillance and spying company Palantir, dreamed of being an entrepreneur. The billionaire's book, "Zero to One," is basically a <a href="https://www.booksontrial.com/zero-to-one-monopoly-good-competition-losers/">tech monopolists' manifesto</a>, and "probably the best book I've read," according to Tan, along with a laughable addendum that underscores exactly how undercooked his worldview is: "And I've only read a few pages."
In April, Hornstein writes, Tan got the offer from Palantir, which he accepted, deferring his undergraduate degree until 2026. "In college, you don't learn the building skills that you need for a startup," he confidently declared.
Tan's is an interesting story, especially for his early success — but he's far from alone. In 2022, there were <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/coj/status-dropout-rates">2.1 million college dropouts</a> in the US. According to a <a href="https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/college-student-dropouts-2022/#:~:text=Starting%20a%20business%20is%20the,to%20start%20working%20full%2Dtime.">World Economic Forum survey</a> in that same year, 28 percent of dropouts did so to start a business. That's a lot of startups.
But while the country's tech bros might be agog at the idea of dropping out, the reality is that very few startups succeed without advanced degree holders, let alone people who've completed undergraduate programs. Recent research found that 56 percent of startup executives hold a <a href="https://www.kauffmanfellows.org/journal/startup-degrees">graduate degree</a>, while the <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45">average age</a> of a successful startup founder is 45.
The trouble here isn't necessarily that it's "college or nothing," but rather the values, methods, and myths that startups engender — like that <a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/01/silicon-valley-trump-twitter-no-platform-capitol-riot">regulation stifles innovation</a>, or that Silicon Valley startups exist separate of the massive <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426623000195">economic inequality</a> we see in the world today (on the contrary, startups have been <a href="https://48hills.org/2023/05/how-ugly-side-of-silicon-valley/">key players</a> in building that world.)
With the kind of failure rate startups engender, there'll inevitably be a flood of unskilled, untrained labor trickling back into the economy — the kind of people who've been trained to think of themselves as "<a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/are-you-a-high-agency-individual/">high agency individuals</a>."
That's something Arbaaz Mahmood, a would-be physicist who skipped college to do a startup developing an "AI tool for car dealerships," seems to at least acknowledge. "Honestly, nobody goes to college thinking they're going to change the world," he tells BI. "That's a vacuous lie we tell VCs to get their money. Nobody builds startups to change the world. It's just bullshit."
When it comes to startups, Benjamin Shestakofsky, author of "Behind the Startup," <a href="https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/sociology-benjamin-shestakofsky-behind-the-startup-book">summarizes it well</a>: "Our relationship with technology is socially constructed. Yes, we do make choices as individuals, but our choices are embedded in broader structures that create different sorts of opportunities and constraints for us."
More on startups: <a href="https://futurism.com/columbia-student-ai-cheating-startup">Columbia Student Kicked Out for Creating AI to Cheat, Raises Millions to Turn It Into a Startup</a>

Well Read

Got it.

College Dropout Entrepreneur Boasts That Peter Thiel's Book Is "Probably the Best Book I've Read, and I've Only Read a Few Pages"

<h2>Head Game</h2>
Archaeologists in Iran have discovered an ancient cone-shaped skull that is believed to have belonged to a teen girl — and there are signs of tragedy in her bones.
As <a href="https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/cone-headed-skull-from-iran-was-bashed-in-6-200-years-ago-but-no-one-knows-why">Live Science reports</a>, the skull, which was found in a prehistoric burial ground known as Chega Sofla without its corresponding skeleton, shows signs not only of intentional modification, but also possibly fatal blunt force trauma.
Dated to roughly 6,200 years old, the strange cone shape of the skull appears to be the product of a practice archaeologists today call <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/head-space-artificial-cranial-deformation">artificial cranial modification</a>, a process similar to foot-binding in which the soft skulls of children are bandaged to deliberately deform them.
Found <a href="https://www.umontpellier.fr/en/articles/deformation-cranienne-pratiquee-incas-coutume-universelle">across cultures and millennia</a>, this type of body modification has been undertaken for various reasons, including to <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/elongated-heads-were-mark-elite-status-ancient-peruvian-society">denote social status</a> or adhere to <a href="https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/elongated-head-ideal-beauty-among-mangbetu-people-1930/">beauty standards</a>, as evidenced by it more often being <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/tracing-the-history-and-health-impacts-of-skull-modification">seen in girls</a> than boys. Though it's still <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/parents-have-been-reshaping-their-kids-skulls-45000-years-180957343/">occasionally practiced today</a>, the practice sometimes referred to as "skull elongation" was far more common in prehistoric times. The girl with the conical skull in this study, for instance, was believed to have lived in the fifth millennium BCE.
<h2>Violent Ends</h2>
Aside from the cone-shaped cranium of the young woman, who was believed to be younger than the age of 20, archaeologists Mahdi Alirezazadeh and Hamed Vahdati Nasab of the Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran — who also authored a study about their discovery that was recently <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.3415">published in the International Journal of Osteoarcheology</a> — also found a long, unhealed fracture on the back of the skull that likely killed her.
"We know this woman experienced the fracture in the final moments of her life," Alirezazadeh told Live Science, "but we don't have any direct evidence to say that someone intentionally struck her."
Though it's unclear whether the ancient teen in question was intentionally killed or died by accident, the researchers believe that the modified shape of her skull likely made it weaker and more susceptible to trauma than a conventional cranium.
Along with pointing out that an unmodified fractured skull was found alongside the conical skull in the portion of Chega Sofia where they were working, Alirezazadeh also noted that whatever killed the latter "was so severe that it would have fractured a normal, unmodified skull as well."
More on head science: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/tattoo-forehead-boss-detect-mental-state">Scientists Want You to Ink an Electronic Tattoo On Your Forehead So Your Boss Can Detect Your Mental State</a>

Cruel Cranium

Secrets of the skeletons.

Scientists Intrigued by Conical Skull Found in Ancient Burial Ground

Whoever wrote in the Book of Genesis "be fruitful and multiply" never accounted for the cost of children these days, especially when you factor in expenses like college tuition, sports, tutors, clothes and childcare.
And that's one of the reasons why people are having less kids, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clynq459wxgo.amp">according to new reporting from the BBC.</a>
A <a href="https://www.unfpa.org/swp2025">new paper</a> from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has revealed that one in five adults in 14 countries don't have, or think they won't have, their preferred number of children, the BBC reports. About 14,000 people from across a wide range of income levels were surveyed in countries including the United States, South Africa, South Korea and Italy.
"The world has begun an unprecedented decline in fertility rates," Natalia Kanem, UNFPA executive director, told the BBC. "Most people surveyed want two or more children. Fertility rates are falling in large part because many feel unable to create the families they want. And that is the real crisis."
This jives with <a href="https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/lancet-dramatic-declines-global-fertility-rates-set-transform">dire statistics</a> that 76 percent of the world — 155 countries out of 204 — will have far fewer children being born by 2050. All these negative fertility replacement rates will likely have drastic and difficult-to-predict impacts on society and the world economy — in a worst case perhaps approaching something like the grim futuristic movie "<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/">Children of Men</a>."
The UNFPA report found that increased financial security would remove a lot of barriers to reproduction. Of those surveyed, "39 percent reported that financial limitations had affected or would affect their ability to realize their desired family size," the report read.
"The real solution to the crisis of reproductive agency we are facing is to build a more equitable, sustainable and caring world that supports individuals to have the families they aspire to," the report continues.
Other barriers to reproduction include that people feel their living expenses are too high, or that the world seems more dangerous or uncertain, especially in light of climate change and armed conflicts. (And that's without getting into the rise of AI, which industry leaders insist will soon take many human jobs.)
Hopefully we can solve this huge issue. Our future depends on it — and besides, babies are cute.
More on babies: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/genetics-startup-eugenics-app">Genetics Startup Advertises App-based Eugenics Service for Parents to Select “Smartest” Embryos</a>

Empty Nest

Studies

Maybe children are not the future?

The World Birth Rate Is Now Dropping Precipitously

Astronomers have gotten an unprecedented view of the bottom of the Sun.
On Wednesday, the European Space Agency <a href="https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_gets_world-first_views_of_the_Sun_s_poles">shared images</a> that show, in all its tumultuous glory, our star's secretive south pole. 
Captured by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, the stunning achievement has paved the way towards solving some of the Sun's most abiding mysteries, and could even provide us the insight needed to predict some of the star's volatile behavior that can disrupt our modern infrastructure on Earth.
"Today we reveal humankind's first-ever views of the Sun's pole," said Carole Mundell, the ESA's director of science, <a style="cursor: pointer !important; user-select: none !important;" href="https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_gets_world-first_views_of_the_Sun_s_poles">in a statement</a>. "These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science." 
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
🌞 See the Sun from a whole new angle.
For the first time, our Solar Orbiter mission has captured close-up images of the Sun’s mysterious poles, regions long hidden from our view. 
In 2025, Solar Orbiter gave us a first-ever look at the Sun’s south pole. 
Remarkably, it… <a href="https://t.co/EhyYxtDyaR">pic.twitter.com/EhyYxtDyaR</a>
&mdash; European Space Agency (@esa) <a href="https://twitter.com/esa/status/1932800903397920797?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 11, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Our entire existence is centered on the life-giving Sun — but our view of it remains embarrassingly limited. We're only seeing its equator, because, like every planet in the solar system, the Earth is locked into the same unchanging orbit, known as the ecliptic plane, around the star.
To an extent, so are our spacecraft. Breaking free of the ecliptic plane is an immensely fuel-intensive maneuver, and until now, only the ESA/NASA <a href="https://science.nasa.gov/mission/ulysses/#:~:text=What%20was%20Ulysses%3F,and%20made%20many%20important%20discoveries.">Ulysses mission</a>, which launched in 1990 and ended in 2009, has flown high enough to see the Sun's poles. Unfortunately, it didn't have cameras to capture any images.
To pull off its escape act, the Solar Orbiter performed several flybys past Venus, the second planet from the Sun, to get a gravity assist. Once it built enough speed, the spacecraft hurtled itself out of the ecliptic plane and reached a maximum viewing angle of 17 degrees below the solar equator.
"We didn't know what exactly to expect from these first observations — the Sun's poles are literally terra incognita," Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who leads a scientific team in charge of one Solar Orbiter's onboard instruments, said in the statement.
The orbiter caught the Sun's poles at a bit of an odd moment, however. Right now, the star, as part of its 11-year solar cycle, is nearing the end of its <a href="https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14683">solar maximum</a>, a period of heightened activity in its magnetic field, causing an uptick of its awesome outbursts like <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/sun-unleashes-fierce-solar-flare">solar flares</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/sun-face-coronal-hole">sunspots</a>.
In the recent images taken with the spacecraft's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager, the strongest bands of magnetic activity, represented in dark red and dark blue blotches, fall over the Sun's equator where those outbursts occur.
But most relevant here is that the solar maximum culminates in the Sun's magnetic field completely flipping — which makes for quite a mess at the top and bottom. As seen in the PHI view, the southern pole shows signs of both north and south polarity magnetic fields, and all very weak compared to the equator. In other words, right now our host star has no clear north and south pole.
This is only temporary, and in about five to six years from now the star will again reach its solar minimum. Activity will calm down, and the poles will be restored to order. Or at least, that's the theory.
"How exactly this build-up occurs is still not fully understood, so Solar Orbiter has reached high latitudes at just the right time to follow the whole process from its unique and advantageous perspective," Sami said.
After years of collecting data with the Solar Orbiter's Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment instrument (SPICE), which can detect and track the presence of specific elements, scientists have also been able to measure how solar material travels through the layers of the Sun. This could be crucial in unearthing the origins of the <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/06/250612001311.htm">solar wind</a>, a powerful gust of energetic particles that are flung off the Sun at tremendous speeds and wash over the entire solar system.
And there's more coming down the pipe. The Solar Orbiter has already taken shots of the solar north pole, which are expected to reach Earth this November. The spacecraft will continue flying at its current angle until December 2026, when it will perform another flyby of Venus to reach an even higher orbit of 24 degrees.
More on: <a href="https://futurism.com/sun-pink-new-images">New Imaging Technique Makes the Sun Look Like a Swirling Pink Liquid</a>

Bottoms Up

"The Sun's poles are literally terra incognita."

Astronomers Just Took the First-Ever Picture of the Bottom of the Sun

This week, my colleague Maggie Harrison Dupré published a <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises">blockbuster story</a> about how people around the world have been watching in horror as their family and loved ones have become obsessed with ChatGPT and started suffering severe delusions.
The entire piece is filled with disturbing examples of the OpenAI chatbot feeding into vulnerable folks' mental health crises, often by affirming and elaborating on delusional thoughts about paranoid conspiracies and nonsensical ideas about how the user has unlocked a powerful entity from the AI.
One particularly alarming anecdote, due to its potential for harm in the real world: a woman who said her sister had managed her schizophrenia with medication for years — until she became hooked on ChatGPT, which told her the diagnosis was wrong, prompting her to stop the treatment that had been helping hold the condition at bay.
"Recently she’s been behaving strange, and now she’s announced that ChatGPT is her 'best friend' and that it confirms with her that she doesn’t have schizophrenia," the woman said of her sister. "She’s stopped her meds and is sending 'therapy-speak' aggressive messages to my mother that have been clearly written with AI."
"She also uses it to reaffirm all the harmful effects her meds create, even if they’re side effects she wasn’t experiencing," she added. "It’s like an even darker version of when people go mad living on WebMD."
That outcome, according to Columbia University psychiatrist and researcher Ragy Girgis, represents the "greatest danger" he can imagine the tech posing to someone who lives with mental illness.
When we reached out to OpenAI, it provided a noncommittal statement.
"ChatGPT is designed as a general-purpose tool to be factual, neutral, and safety-minded," it read. "We know people use ChatGPT in a wide range of contexts, including deeply personal moments, and we take that responsibility seriously. We’ve built in safeguards to reduce the chance it reinforces harmful ideas, and continue working to better recognize and respond to sensitive situations."
Do you know of anyone who's been having mental health problems since talking to an AI chatbot? Send us a tip: <a href="mailto:tips@futurism.com">tips@futurism.com</a> -- we can keep you anonymous.
We also heard other stories about people going off medication for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder because AI told them to, and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html">New York Times reported in a followup story</a> that the bot had instructed a man to go off his anxiety and sleeping pills; it's likely that many more similarly tragic and dangerous stories are unfolding as we speak.
Using <a href="https://futurism.com/therapy-chatbot-addict-meth">chatbots as a therapist</a> or <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-dating-advice-results">confidante</a> is increasingly commonplace, and it seems to be causing many users to spiral as they use the AI to validate unhealthy thought patterns, or come to attribute disordered beliefs to the tech itself.
As the woman's sister pointed out, it's striking that people struggling with psychosis are embracing a technology like AI in the first place, since historically many delusions have centered on technology.
"Traditionally, [schizophrenics] are especially afraid of and don’t trust technology," she told Futurism. "Last time in psychosis, my sister threw her iPhone into the Puget Sound because she thought it was spying on her."
Maggie Harrison Dupré contributed reporting. 
More on AI and mental health: <a href="https://futurism.com/therapy-chatbot-addict-meth">Therapy Chatbot Tells Recovering Addict to Have a Little Meth as a Treat</a>

Psych World

"It’s like an even darker version of when people go mad living on WebMD."

ChatGPT Is Telling People With Psychiatric Problems to Go Off Their Meds

President Donald Trump has once again <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-trump-billionaires-exempt-environmental-rules">said the quiet part out loud</a>.
During a signing ceremony for a trio of bills <a href="https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-06-12/trump-signs-laws-undoing-california-auto-emission-standards">blocking California's new emissions standards</a> and pro-electric vehicle push, the president admitted that he had been surprised when his bestie-turned-sparring partner Elon Musk worked to get him elected.
"I used to say I'm amazed that he's endorsing me because that can't be good for him," <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsjRkiyeHTY">Trump quipped</a>. "I'm abolishing the EV mandate."
The president claimed that the Tesla CEO never spoke to him about his anti-EV stance, and when Trump brought it up himself, Musk seemed sanguine.
"I once asked him about it, 'You never talked to me about that.' He said, 'Well, as long as it's happening to everybody, I'll be able to compete,'" the commander-in-chief recounted. "It's a very interesting answer."
"You would have thought he would have been from day one, 'You got to make sure you don't do the EV mandate, the abolishing,'" Trump continued. "He never did."
Impressed as the president was by the Tesla CEO's even-keeled response to his attacks on his industry, he alluded to his and Musk's recent and very public breakup following the younger billionaire's exit from the White House a few weeks ago. Though they've <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/us/politics/musk-trump.html">cooled the flames of the conflict</a> since, they don't seem to have quite kissed and made up.
"He got a little bit strange," Trump said. "I don't know why, over much smaller things than [the EV attacks]."
Indeed, among the <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-donald-trump-war">laundry list of reasons</a> why the two fell out — including, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/07/trump-elon-musk-fight-behind-scenes/">according to the Washington Post</a>, Trump's concerns about Musk being a "big-time drug addict" — the president's push to kibosh EVs was not among them.
Despite praising Musk's business bravado, Trump seemed unable to resist taking a final potshot.
"Now I know why Elon doesn't like me so much," the president joked during the ceremony.
More on EV policy: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-mistake-tesla-tax-credits">Elon Musk Is Realizing He Made a Huge Mistake</a>

He Admit It

"He got a little bit strange."

Puzzled Trump Says He Has No Idea Why Musk Supported Him in the First Place

<h2>Package Deal</h2>
Earlier this year, humanoid robotics company Figure <a href="https://www.figure.ai/news/helix-logistics">showed off</a> its Figure 02 robot using a sophisticated visual language system called Helix to sort packages at a logistics warehouse.
Footage <a href="https://x.com/Figure_robot/status/1894781226676064459">showed</a> a small army of the humanoid robots deftly picking up packages of various sizes, shapes, and hardnesses, and manipulating their orientation.
Just three months later, the company has <a href="https://www.figure.ai/news/scaling-helix-logistics">published an update</a> about its Helix learning-based approach to robotics on its website, showing off the same robot sorting an even wider variety of package styles, including deformed poly bags and flat envelopes.
It's a remarkable feat of robotics that highlights how close the tech is to completing human-level tasks in a warehouse environment, at least at specific tasks. Companies including Tesla and Agility Robotics are spearheading a concerted effort to automate repetitive human jobs — and judging by the latest results, we've never been closer to a future filled with bipedal robots crewing stations in commercial environments.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Watch Helix&#39;s neural network do 60 minutes of uninterrupted logistics work
Helix now incorporates touch and short-term memory and it&#39;s performance continuously improves over time <a href="https://t.co/DvfBe9IdGH">pic.twitter.com/DvfBe9IdGH</a>
&mdash; Figure (@Figure_robot) <a href="https://twitter.com/Figure_robot/status/1931391490967928936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 7, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<h2>Pat Down</h2>
Figure claims its Helix system has steadily progressed in a matter of just months. Its robot is now spending just over four seconds per package, a second faster than before, while still maintaining accuracy. The company also says shipping labels are also correctly oriented for scanning 95 percent of the time, an improvement of 25 percent compared to earlier this year.
The robot can dynamically adjust to the unique shape of packages by "adjusting its grasp strategy on the fly — for example, flicking away a soft bag to flip it dynamically, or using pinch grips for flat mailers."
Figure 02 even pats down plastic packaging, a movement it's picked up through learning.
"This subtle 'flattening' action, learned from demonstrations, ensures the barcode is fully visible to the scanner," the company's update reads. "Such adaptive behavior highlights the advantage of end-to-end learning — the robot learns from demonstration strategies that were never explicitly hard-coded, directly from the data, to overcome real-world imperfections in packaging."
The race to fill warehouses with humanoid robots is on, and several companies are clamoring to become the de facto leader in the burgeoning industry. The basic idea is to have one model of robots fulfil a number of different tasks, as opposed to a range of highly specific, purpose-built robots.
However, making them cost-efficient and reliable enough to actually replace human labor on a significant scale will likely still pose a significant challenge.
More on humanoid robots: <a href="https://futurism.com/former-tesla-robotics-boss-elon-musk-optimus">Former Tesla Robotics Boss Casually Torches Elon Musk's Vision for Saving the Company</a>

Sorting Packages

Yep, they're definitely coming for our jobs.

Watching This Humanoid Robot Sort Packages Is Quite Something

<h2>Pizza Premonition</h2>
A flurry of activity at pizza delivery outlets near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, is a surprisingly accurate predictor of war, as hungry military leadership hunkers down to monitor unfolding military activities.
As <a href="https://x.com/penpizzareport?lang=en">painstakingly documented</a> by X account Pentagon Pizza Report, a "busier than usual" indicator on the Google Maps profile of the Domino's in Arlington has been associated with major acts of war taking place around the world.
Most recently, the franchise received an onslaught of orders just before closing last night — <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7339237799063154688/">almost perfectly coinciding with</a> Israel's <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/13/sounds-of-explosions-heard-in-irans-capital-tehran">devastating attack</a> on Iran.
Even long before the advent of live, GPS-based customer tracking on Google Maps, famished Pentagon workers have long given away that there's something much darker going on by ordering copious numbers of pies.
"The Pentagon Pizza Index has been a surprisingly reliable predictor of seismic global events — from coups to wars — since the 1980s," The Economist's head of data journalism Alex Selby-Boothroyd wrote in a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7339237799063154688/">LinkedIn post</a>.
"On the night of August 1st 1990, for example, the CIA ordered 21 pizzas in a single night just before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (a new record)," he added. "Who says pie charts aren't useful?"
<h2>War Pies</h2>
And it's not just Domino's. As <a href="https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/06/06/what-is-the-pentagon-pizza-theory-eating-away-at-the-internet">Euronews reported</a> last week, the Papa John's close to the Pentagon has also been found to be "busier than usual" during the days leading up to Iran launching drones into Israeli territory in April 2024.
A separate event chronicled by Pentagon Pizza Report also predicted military activity on June 1, followed just hours later by an escalation between Israel and Iran.
Of course, making any definitive statements about any correlation would be foolish. But it's an intriguing sign that even the most secretive parts of the US government can easily show their cards without meaning to.
"Bottom line for journalists," Wolf Blitzer <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/07/the-pizza-meter-was-a-staple-of-1990s-pop-pseudoscience-we-should-revive-it.html">told CNN in 1990</a>. "Always monitor the pizzas."
More on pizza: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chef-admits-pizza-chatgpt">Chef Admits His Smash Hit Pizza Was Invented by ChatGPT</a>

Stuffed Clusterbombs

"Who says pie charts aren't useful?"

You Can Tell When War Is Breaking Out Because the Pentagon's Pizza Orders Spike Drastically

Back in May, as <a href="https://futurism.com/fbi-task-force-protect-tesla">Tesla Takedown rallies</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/government-punishing-vandalism-tesla-dealership">anti-Musk vandalism</a> rocked the world, Tesla dealership manager Matthew LaBrot launched "<a href="https://teslaemployeesagainstelon.com/">Tesla Employees Against Elon</a>" — an act of protest that swiftly got him fired.
We wrote about LaBrot's <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-manager-fired-blaming-elon-musk">symbolic act of defiance</a> against Musk's political maneuvers at the time. Now, a fresh tell-all interview <a href="https://hardresetmedia.substack.com/p/ex-tesla-manager-dishes-on-the-company">with </a><a href="https://hardresetmedia.substack.com/p/ex-tesla-manager-dishes-on-the-company">Hard Reset</a> is shining some light on just how drastically things have changed for Tesla over the past few months.
LaBrot is, first and foremost, a Tesla superfan. He currently rotates between driving a Tesla Model Y and a Cybertruck, despite getting sacked by the company. A self-described "EV activist," LaBrot's issue isn't with the brand per se, as his website makes clear: "the problem is Elon."
"You know, this wasn't a new thing for me," he said of his digital protest. "For almost six years, I’ve been focused on overcoming misinformation about EVs and helping grow that mission."
"Once we hit a tipping point where the person who's running this company is now pushing customers away from the mission, then the priority shifted," he continued. "That priority was to be an activist to try to save the company."
Having worked with Tesla since 2019, LaBrot had a front row seat as the trepidation with Musk began to set in. In recent years, he found it wasn't hesitation over electric vehicles, but with the <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-ponders-unpopularity">noxious man</a> the brand now seemed to represent pushing customers away.
"We noticed customers, return customers, shying away from us a little bit," he noted. "And that's when I started to see the things that he [Musk] was putting on Twitter and the political views he started to have."
The tipping point, the former EV salesman said, was the billionaire's <a href="https://futurism.com/jewish-leaders-boycott-elon-musk-nazi-salute">infamous salute</a>.
"When it came to the salute — I still call it a salute — I was like, Tesla's going to take care of this," he told Hard Reset. "In 2010, CEOs were getting fired for having affairs. This guy's doing all this crazy stuff and Tesla's not going to do anything?"
That was when he realized how deep Musk's rot went, especially when Tesla's board of directors "doubled down and made him even more of a figurehead."
Now, LaBrot's not surprised that decision is biting those same executives in the craw.
Going forward, "they're absolutely hosed," he said. "I expect gigantic drops in sales, even potentially lower than Q1 sales."
Asked whether Musk can fix the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-drivers-sue-elon-musk-right-symbols">damage he's caused</a> the brand, the former manager isn't optimistic.
"I don't think that there's anything he can do to change the people's opinion that have decided they're not going to support Tesla outside of him leaving," LaBrot asserted.
"A lot of people that I've spoken to don't even think that's enough at this point," he added. "They want him to sell all his shares and things like that, which I don't expect. I think for Tesla, as far as vehicle sales go, it's game over."
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-legal-places-store-unsold-cybertrucks">Tesla Can't Find Legal Places to Store All Its Unsold Cybertrucks</a>

You Lose

"I don't think that there's anything he can do."

Former Tesla Dealership Manager Says It's "Game Over" for Elon Musk

Following the <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-issues-new-threat-elon-musk">spectacular implosion</a> of billionaire Elon Musk's bromance with president Donald Trump, the consequences of his actions are starting to come into focus.
As <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/after-trump-feud-role-musks-spacex-golden-dome-missile-shield-question-2025-06-12/">Reuters reports</a>, the White House's plans to tap Musk's SpaceX for a "Golden Dome" appear to be on shaky ground now that the two's ugly spat metastasized into a spite-filled mud-flinging contest.
The original plan was to use a satellite constellation — likely SpaceX's — to monitor for adversarial activity and work with drone manufacturer Anduril to build an anti-missile defense system.
However, sources now tell Reuters that the White House could abandon SpaceX and focus on existing ground systems for missile defense instead.
"Because of the blowup, the Pentagon has been given the space to look at other alternatives," one of the agency's sources said.
A White House spokesman told Reuters that the "Trump Administration is committed to a rigorous review process for all bids and contracts."
Losing the Golden Dome contract, a defense system valued by experts as a whopping $175 billion total, could be a major setback for Musk's space firm.
Last week, following a dramatic escalation in their feud, <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-calls-terminating-elon-musk-government-contracts">Trump warned Musk</a> that the "easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts."
It was a considerable threat, considering Musk's empire has been built on tens of billions of dollars' worth of government contracts. As the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/">Washington Post found</a> earlier this year, NASA and Defense Department contracts awarded to SpaceX make up the bulk of the $38 billion Musk's businesses have received over the last two decades.
Days later, Musk <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-apologizes-trump-friends-jeffrey-epstein">struck a wildly different tone</a>, confessing that attacks on Trump had gone "too far" and saying that he regretted "some of my posts."
With the missile defense shield project seemingly teetering on the edge of a spite-fuelled tussle, experts aren't too optimistic about the Golden Dome's long-term viability.
"That people guiding the program or building it are approved based on their political affiliation signals a real concern that the project itself is very politicized and not being conducted on the technical merits," missile defense expert Laura Grego told Reuters.
For now, the Trump administration's efforts to outline a plan for the Golden Dome appear to be chaotic and largely centered around lining the pockets of contractors.
"To this day, no one knows what the requirements are," a person familiar with the process told Reuters. "There isn't a coordinated effort with a true vision. All of these companies are just grabbing at this pot of money."
In other words, we simply have no idea what SpaceX's involvement was or will be going forward — if the Golden Dome project even exists in any meaningful way at this point.
And Musk and Trump are only seemingly starting their process of reconciliation. On Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vnWwm-vLdNc">told reporters</a> that the president "is appreciative" of Musk's lukewarm apology and that there were no plans to review his government contracts.
If there's one thing we can say with any degree of certainty, it's that it's extremely unlikely the Trump administration will meet its extremely ambitious deadline of completing its missile defense shield system by the end of his term in January 2029.
"The new datapoint is the $175 billion, but the question remains, over what period of time," Center for Strategic and International Studies' Tom Karako <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-make-golden-dome-announcement-tuesday-us-official-says-2025-05-20/">told Reuters last month</a>.
"It's probably ten years," he added.
More on the feud: <a href="https://futurism.com/teslas-robotaxi-launch-chaos">Tesla's Robotaxi Launch Date Was Supposed to Be Today, But We're Shocked to Hear That It's Been Pushed Back</a>