The iFold Cometh: Apple Reinvents the Wheel While Steve Jobs Performs 10,000 RPM in His Titanium Mausoleum

By

-

May 11, 2025

An illustration of the Apple iFold, the foldable iPhone

In a shocking twist that absolutely no one saw coming except literally everyone with a passing interest in consumer technology, Apple plans to release its revolutionary, groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting foldable iPhone in 2026. The device, which industry insiders definitely aren’t calling the “iFold” because that would require Apple’s naming department to experience a genuine creative impulse, will arrive a mere seven years after Samsung first introduced the concept to the market. At this pace, we can expect Apple to invent teleportation approximately 45 years after everyone else has been beaming to work.

According to multiple reports that Apple has neither confirmed nor deployed black-ops teams to suppress, the foldable iPhone will feature a book-style design with a 5.7-inch outer display when closed and an approximately 8-inch screen when unfolded.¹ This marks the first time in history Apple has looked at Samsung’s homework, waited half a decade, and then turned in the same assignment with slightly supposed better handwriting.

Tim Cook’s Grand Vision: Make Products Thinner Until They Literally Disappear

The foldable iPhone will reportedly measure between 4.5mm and 4.8mm when unfolded, continuing Apple’s relentless pursuit of devices so thin they can only be seen when viewed edge-on.² Apple engineers have apparently solved the problem of “physics” and “material strength” by creating a device that, when measured by conventional instruments, technically has negative thickness.

“Our revolutionary foldable has the structural integrity of tissue paper but costs as much as a used car,” said a Apple executive while rhythmically tapping on a MacBook made of recycled aluminum and the tears of repair technicians. “We’ve invested billions in creating a hinge so sophisticated that it will absolutely, positively not break unless you look at it wrong, breathe near it, or attempt to use it for its intended purpose.”

Industry analysts speculate that the device will incorporate titanium and stainless steel in its hinge mechanism, presumably so that when it inevitably breaks, you can melt it down and recover at least $15 worth of precious metals from your $2,500 investment.³

Apple’s Bold New Pricing Strategy: “What If We Just Charged More?”

Speaking of that price tag, multiple reports suggest the foldable iPhone will retail between $2,000 and $2,500, making it the most expensive iPhone ever and cementing Apple’s position as the only company that can convince consumers that paying mortgage-level prices for a phone is perfectly reasonable.⁴

“Our market research indicates that many Apple customers still have functioning kidneys, which represents an untapped revenue stream,” explained a Apple CFO while bathing in a tub of liquid cash. “The $2,500 price point was carefully calculated based on the maximum amount we can charge before people start questioning their life choices, multiplied by the blind Apple brand loyalty coefficient.”

When asked why the foldable would cost more than twice as much as the standard iPhone, the executive smiled knowingly. “We’ve added a hinge. Do you have any idea how expensive hinges are? They’re practically extinct in the wild. We had to breed them in captivity.”

The Launch Schedule Shuffle: “It’s Not Confusing If You’re Rich Enough”

In what tech journalists are describing as “a spreadsheet nightmare,” Apple plans to completely revamp its iPhone launch strategy to accommodate the foldable device. Starting in 2026, the company will release the iPhone 18 Pro models, a mysterious “Air” variant, and the foldable in fall 2026, while delaying the standard iPhone 18 until spring 2027.

This staggered release schedule – which would require an advanced degree in Apple Product Management to comprehend – is reportedly designed to “streamline” the broader six-model iPhone lineup.⁵ Because nothing says “streamlined” like splitting your flagship product launch across two separate seasons of the year.

“We found that having a single, easy-to-understand product launch each year was causing dangerous levels of customer satisfaction,” said a Apple marketing director. “Our new approach ensures that no matter when you buy an iPhone, you can immediately experience the crushing regret of knowing a better one is coming out in six months.”

The company’s internal research apparently shows that customer confusion leads to panic buying of the most expensive model available, in a psychological phenomenon economists call “just make it stop pricing.”

The Face ID Vanishing Act: “We Put It Under the Display Because We Can”

In addition to folding innovations, the 2026 iPhone Pro models will reportedly feature under-display Face ID technology, with the facial recognition hardware embedded beneath the screen. This breakthrough allows Apple to shrink the Dynamic Island cutout to a small pill or hole in the top-left corner, in what engineers are calling “Dynamic Peninsula” or possibly “Dynamic Archipelago” depending on which marketing focus group responds better.

“We’ve managed to hide the Face ID sensors under the display,” boasted a conjectural Apple engineer. “Not because anyone asked for it or because it meaningfully improves the user experience, but because Samsung did it and we needed something else to mention in the keynote besides the fold.”

When questioned about potential reliability issues with the hidden sensors, the engineer nodded thoughtfully. “Oh, they’ll absolutely be less reliable. But they’ll be less reliable elegantly.”

The Courage to Follow: Apple’s Bold New Direction of Going Where Others Have Been

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Apple’s foldable plans is the company’s breathtaking courage to follow in the footsteps of nearly every other major smartphone manufacturer. After watching Samsung, Motorola, Google, and various Chinese companies pioneer and refine foldable technology since 2019, Apple has finally decided the concept is sufficiently mature to receive the blessing of its marketing department.⁶

“We believe foldables represent the future of smartphones,” declared an apocryphal Apple VP of Innovation while adjusting his perfectly circular glasses. “Not the past future, which was five years ago when everyone else released them, but the future future, which is when we decide to acknowledge their existence.”

When reminded that Samsung is already on its sixth generation of foldable phones, the executive smiled thinly. “Yes, but have they charged $2,500 for one and called it ‘magical’? Checkmate!”

The iPad Division’s Existential Crisis: “We’re In Danger, Aren’t We?”

The most fascinating aspect of this development is Apple’s apparent willingness to cannibalize iPad sales, breaking with its historical approach of maintaining clear boundaries between product categories.

“For years, Apple told us touchscreen Macs would never happen because they would hurt iPad sales,” explained industry analyst Victoria Richards. “Now they are making a phone that unfolds into an iPad. It’s like watching a strict vegetarian order a 40-ounce ribeye while explaining they have always been a carnivore.”

The iPad division is reportedly in a collective state of panic. “I just got people to start using this thing for actual work instead of just watching Netflix in bed,” lamented an iPad product manager into their locally-sourced kombucha. “Now they’re going to fold a phone in half and call it an iPad killer? I should have taken that job at Microsoft.”

When asked about the potential impact on iPad sales, an Apple executive deflected. “The iFold – I mean, the foldable iPhone – creates an entirely new product category. It’s not a phone. It’s not a tablet. It’s a… phablet. Wait, no, Samsung used that name. It’s a… foldy-phone-pad-thing. Our marketing department is still workshopping it.”

The $700 Million Crease Solution: “It’s Not a Crease, It’s a Feature”

One area where Apple genuinely appears to be innovating is in solving the dreaded “crease problem” that has plagued foldable displays. Reports indicate that Apple’s foldable will feature a display that appears crease-free to the human eye, thanks to a development effort that likely cost more than the GDP of Mauritius.

“We’ve spent approximately $700 million eliminating the crease,” bragged an Apple materials scientist. “Not because it affected functionality in any meaningful way, but because it offended Jony Ive’s ghost, which still haunts our design studio despite him having left the company years ago and being very much alive.”

The solution reportedly involves a proprietary combination of ultra-thin glass, nanopolymers, and the tears of Android users who paid $1,800 for first-generation foldables that broke within a week.

The 20th Anniversary Gift: A Completely Different Philosophy

In what can only be described as cosmic timing, Apple’s second-generation foldable is set to launch in 2027 – exactly twenty years after Jobs unveiled the original iPhone. This perfect symmetry suggests either brilliant marketing or that Tim Cook has discovered time travel.

“For the 20th anniversary of the product that changed everything, we wanted to create something special,” an Apple executive might say. “So we decided to completely abandon its foundational principles and make it fold in half. It’s poetic, really.”

The irony isn’t lost on tech historians who recall Jobs’ original iPhone presentation, where he mocked other phones for having too many buttons and moving parts. Two decades later, Apple’s solution appears to be adding the most significant moving part possible: a massive hinge that transforms their sleek monolith into what is essentially two phones stuck together with industrial-strength tape.

“Steve always said the consumer doesn’t know what they want until we show it to them,” said Tim Cook’s evil twin, Jim Cook. “We’ve updated that to: The consumer doesn’t know what they want until Samsung shows it to them, they buy it, and then we make a slightly more polished version five years later and charge double.”

What do you think? Will you be mortgaging your home to purchase the Apple iFold when it arrives in 2026? Will Steve Jobs complete his transformation into a perpetual motion machine? Has Apple finally run out of ideas, or is this genuinely the next evolution of the smartphone? Comment below with your hottest takes on Apple’s bendable future.

And if this article gave you a chuckle, consider donating to TechOnion-we need the funds to develop a foldable newsletter that's thinner, lighter, and three times more expensive than reading it on your phone.

References

The Upside-Down Revolution: How Apple’s Magic Mouse Charging Port Creates Character While Destroying Productivity

By

Simba the "Tech King"

-

May 11, 2025

0

An illustration of the Apple Magic Mouse

In what tech historians are calling “the most deliberate inconvenience since the invention of automatic phone menus,” Apple has once again released a Magic Mouse with its charging port stubbornly located on the bottom, rendering the device completely unusable during charging. The latest USB-C version of the Magic Mouse, released in October 2024, continues Apple’s brave tradition of forcing users to flip their mice belly-up like exhausted turtles whenever battery life dwindles.¹

This design choice – which has persisted through multiple iterations and almost a decade of mockery – stands as perhaps the most perfect metaphor for Apple’s relationship with its customers: beautiful, expensive, innovative, and absolutely infuriating in ways that make you question whether the company secretly hates its customers.

The Charging Position: Technically Called “Dead Bug Mode”

When plugged in, the Magic Mouse must be flipped on its back, with its smooth white surface facing upward and the charging cable protruding from its underside like a technological umbilical cord. This position has been affectionately dubbed “dead bug mode” by users, who note the similarity to an insect that has reached the end of its lifecycle and accepted its fate.²

“It’s actually quite elegant when you think about it,” explained an Apple design executive while carefully polishing what appeared to be a solid gold paperweight. “Most companies would allow a mouse to be used while charging, forcing users to continue working. We’ve created a mandatory two-minute meditation break. Your mouse isn’t broken – it’s teaching you mindfulness.”

According to internal documents that definitely exist, Apple has categorized this feature under “Enforced Digital Wellbeing” in its design philosophy handbook, alongside other wellness initiatives such as “Battery Anxiety as Cardiac Exercise” and “Face ID Failures as Momentary Zen Koans.”

Steve Jobs Would Have Loved It (Or Fired Everyone Involved)

Despite popular memes suggesting Steve Jobs would “never have let this happen,” Apple insiders insist that Jobs would have embraced the upside-down charging design as a character-building exercise for users.³

“Steve always believed technology should have personality,” said a former Jobs associate who requested anonymity because they fear being mocked in an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. “And what builds more character than feeling slightly inconvenienced several times a month? Steve used to say that true innovation happens in moments of frustration, usually around 3 AM when you’re trying to finish a project and your magic mouse dies.”

This perspective contradicts well-documented evidence that Jobs was fanatical about usability and once fired an engineer for a rounded corner when he wanted a square one. However, Jobs was also known for his strong opinions about mouse design, famously resisting multi-button mice until late in his tenure.⁴

“Steve was a firm believer in the fact that if you make the user interface (UI) good enough, you should be able to do everything you need with just one button,” said Abraham Farag, Apple’s former Senior Mechanical Engineer of Product Design. This single-button philosophy eventually evolved into the Magic Mouse’s touch-sensitive surface – a design compromise that allowed for right-click functionality without visible buttons.

When asked if Jobs would have approved of a mouse that becomes completely useless while charging, the Apple executive smiled knowingly. “Steve used to say, ‘The best interface is no interface.’ We’ve just taken that to its logical conclusion – sometimes the best mouse is no mouse at all.”

The Secret Origin Story: A Design Choice Born of Necessity (or Laziness)

According to product designers who have analyzed the Magic Mouse, the controversial charging port location wasn’t originally intended as a philosophical statement about mindfulness or character-building, but rather stemmed from practical considerations during the transition from the battery-powered Magic Mouse 1 to the rechargeable Magic Mouse 2.⁵

“The first Magic Mouse had removable batteries and wasn’t charged with a cable,” explained a product designer on Reddit. “When Apple made the Magic Keyboard 2 with non-removable batteries, it was also time for the Magic Mouse to get rid of the batteries… But Apple is known for not changing the whole design if it’s not really necessary!”⁶

This explanation suggests the bottom placement was merely the path of least resistance – the batteries were already located on the bottom of the original Magic Mouse, so Apple simply replaced them with a rechargeable battery and added a charging port in the same location.

However, this pragmatic explanation fails to account for Apple’s decision to maintain this design for almost a decade, across multiple product refreshes, despite widespread mockery and the obvious solution of moving the port to the front of the device.

The Two-Minute Defense: “It Charges Really Fast, Though”

Apple defenders (also known as “people who have spent too much on Apple products to admit any disappointment”) frequently point to the Magic Mouse’s quick charging capabilities as justification for its upside-down design quirk.

“It takes 2 minutes to get more than a full day’s charge,” noted one Reddit user, suggesting the inconvenience is minimal. Apple’s promotional materials claim that just two minutes of charging will provide nine hours of use, theoretically allowing users to plug in during a coffee break and return to a mouse that will last the rest of the workday.

This defense, while technically accurate, fails to address the fundamental question: Why not just put the charging port on the front so people can keep working while charging???

“The answer is obvious,” insisted our Apple executive. “If we put the charging port on the front, users would leave it plugged in all the time, transforming our beautiful, sleek, wireless mouse into a wired one. That’s like buying a Ferrari and then attaching a trailer hitch. It undermines the entire aesthetic experience.”

The Cult of Inconvenience: Apple’s Secret Design Philosophy

To understand Apple’s commitment to the upside-down charging port, one must understand a secret design philosophy that has allegedly guided the company since its earliest days: “Curated Inconvenience Theory.”

According to this completely plausible theory, Apple deliberately introduces small frustrations into its products to create a sense of shared struggle among Apple users, fostering brand loyalty through a phenomenon similar to Stockholm syndrome.

“It’s like hazing for a fraternity,” explained Dr. Eleanor Rigby, Professor of Consumer Psychology at a prestigious university that definitely exists. “These small inconveniences – dongles, proprietary cables, charging ports in ridiculous locations – create a sense of belonging. When you see another person flipping their Magic Mouse upside down in a coffee shop, you share a knowing glance. You’re both members of the same exclusive club of people who have chosen to be mildly inconvenienced for aesthetic reasons.”

This theory explains other Apple design choices, from removing headphone jacks to the brief disaster of the butterfly keyboard. They’re not bugs; they’re features designed to strengthen user loyalty through shared suffering.

The 2024 Update: Same Ridiculousness, New Port

In October 2024, when Apple finally updated the Magic Mouse with USB-C to match the rest of its product line, many hoped the company would take the opportunity to relocate the charging port to a more sensible position. Those hopes were dashed when images revealed the new Magic Mouse maintained the same upside-down charging design, just with a different port shape.

“Although it now has USB-C, the charging port is still on the bottom of the mouse,” reported 9to5Mac, in what might be the least surprising tech news of 2024.

This steadfast commitment to an objectively terrible design choice has left even the most dedicated Apple fans questioning whether the company is simply trolling its user base at this point.

“Priced at $99, this latest Magic Mouse indicates that Apple still believes the most effective method for charging the device is to flip it upside down, rendering it unusable during the charging process,” The Verge reported, with what one imagines was a heavy sigh.

The Future of Magic Mouse Design: “It Gets Worse”

According to sources close to Apple’s design, the company has even more inconvenient charging solutions planned for future Magic Mouse iterations.

“We’re looking at several exciting new charging mechanisms,” revealed a Apple innovation lead. “One prototype requires users to balance the mouse on its side like a coin. Another must be submerged in a proprietary charging fluid that costs $49.99 per ounce. My personal favorite requires users to gently stroke the mouse while whispering affirmations to it.”

When asked why the company doesn’t simply move the port to the front like literally every other rechargeable mouse on the market, the innovation lead stared blankly for several seconds before responding: “I don’t understand the question.”

The Deeper Meaning: An Existential Crisis Disguised as a Mouse

Perhaps the Magic Mouse’s upside-down charging design isn’t just about aesthetics or tradition or even stubbornness. Perhaps it’s a profound statement about the nature of technology itself – sometimes beautiful, sometimes useful, but never quite perfect.

In a world where we expect our devices to be flawless extensions of ourselves, the Magic Mouse stands as a reminder of our own limitations. Like us, it occasionally needs to rest, to recharge, to take a break from constant productivity.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a terrible design that Apple is too proud to fix.

As the Magic Mouse lies helplessly on its back, charging cable protruding awkwardly from its smooth underbelly, it serves as the perfect metaphor for our relationship with technology: elegant, powerful, expensive, and occasionally infuriating in ways that make you question everything about your life choices.

What do you think? Is the Magic Mouse’s upside-down charging port a stroke of design genius or the most irritating example of form over function in modern tech? Have you ever lost critical work time because your mouse was lying helplessly on its back like an overturned tortoise? Share your Magic Mouse horror stories in the comments below. 💝🎁

And if this article made you chuckle while simultaneously questioning your expensive tech purchases, consider donating to TechOnion-we accept all forms of payment except Magic Mice that are currently charging.

References

DOGE Capital: Elon Musk’s Ultimate Startup Where MVP Stands for ‘Minimum Viable Presidency’

By

Simba the "Tech King"

-

May 11, 2025

0

An AI generated image of Elon Musk running DOGE services

In the gleaming corridors of what used to be the U.S. Digital Services – now rebranded as the U.S. DOGE Service – a revolution is unfolding. Elon Musk, the man who promised to colonize Mars, revolutionize transportation, and implant chips in human brains, has now set his sights on a truly impossible challenge: making the U.S. government efficient.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), despite not being an official government department (because only Congress can create those, but why let constitutional details get in the way of disruption?), has become Musk’s latest venture.¹ And like any good Silicon Valley founder, he’s applying the same proven strategy that has worked for all his companies: setting impossible goals, demanding employees work like they’re possessed, sending bizarre late-night communications, and leaving just before the consequences arrive.²

The Lean Government Canvas

Musk’s approach to government transformation follows the classic lean startup methodology. First, identify a problem: government inefficiency. Second, propose a solution so audacious it sounds made up: cut $1-2 trillion from federal spending.³ Third, build a Minimum Viable Product: in this case, a Minimum Viable Presidency where essential services like Social Security and Medicare are treated as optional features that can be cut from the sprint if they don’t show immediate ROI.⁴

“We need to run the government like we run SpaceX,” Musk reportedly told a room full of civil servants with 30-year careers in public administration. “When code doesn’t work, we delete it. When a rocket explodes, we build another one. When employees complain about bathroom breaks, we remind them that Mars isn’t colonizing itself.”

The bewildered federal employees nodded, wondering if their healthcare benefits could survive a rapid iteration cycle.

Pivoting the Constitution

One of DOGE’s most innovative strategies has been its willingness to “pivot” away from constitutional constraints. When faced with the reality that only the US Congress can create departments or appropriate funds, the DOGE team simply reframed the limitation as “legacy thinking” that needed disruption.⁵

“The Constitution is basically just version 1.0 of the government’s operating system,” explained a DOGE spokesperson who previously worked at three failed NFT marketplaces. “It was written when people used quills. We use Slack now. Evolution is inevitable.”

This approach has led to several “growth hacks,” such as demanding all federal employees justify their existence in five bullet points or face automatic “user churn” (previously known as “firing”), attempting to access and modify sensitive Treasury payment systems (dismissed as “just playing around in the sandbox”), and declaring entire agencies redundant after a 12-minute evaluation (described as “efficient decision velocity”).⁶

The Crazy Uncle Economy

Inside sources report that many in the Trump administration have taken to calling Elon Musk “Crazy Uncle Elon,” a nickname that captures both his penchant for dad jokes and his resemblance to that relative who corners you at Thanksgiving to explain his theory about how the microwave is spying on him.

“I’ve shared a room with Elon Musk, and he constantly attempts to be humorous,” a senior Trump administration official told Rolling Stone. “And he simply isn’t funny. Not even close.”

This communication style has permeated DOGE’s operations. Federal agencies now receive policy directives interspersed with memes, references to ’69,’ and occasional graphic sexual images sent to federal employees. When one department head questioned whether this was appropriate government communication, they reportedly received a response consisting solely of the ‘Deal With It’ sunglasses GIF.

The East India Company 2.0 has arrived, and it communicates exclusively in impact font.

The Data-Driven Government (Your Data, His Government)

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of DOGE’s operation is its unprecedented access to sensitive government systems. Reports indicate DOGE employees have obtained permission to view data in the U.S. government’s payment system, which includes bank account information, Social Security numbers, and income tax documents.

This has led to what Musk calls “data-driven governance.” In startup parlance, this means making decisions based on metrics and analytics. In practical terms, it means a Tesla engineer with no government experience now potentially has access to your tax returns.

“This is just standard A/B testing,” Musk explained when questioned about reports that DOGE was experimenting with blocking certain government payments. “We’re seeing what happens if we just don’t send Social Security checks to, say, every third person. Does it really impact quality of life metrics? The data will tell us.”

When reminded that these “metrics” represent actual human beings depending on those payments, Musk reportedly became defensive. “Look, every great product requires user sacrifice. You think the first Tesla didn’t catch fire sometimes? Excellence requires iteration.”

The Conflict of Interest Economy

The most remarkable achievement of DOGE may be its ability to transform potential conflicts of interest into what Musk calls “vertical integration opportunities.”

Consider that Musk controls companies with billions in federal contracts, including SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and xAI, and now has direct access to the inner workings of the very agencies that oversee and pay for those contracts.

In any previous administration, this might have raised ethical concerns. In the DOGE era, it’s simply described as “eliminating inefficient middlemen” and “streamlining the value chain.”

“It just makes sense,” explained a DOGE team member wearing a ‘HODL Government’ t-shirt. “Why should Elon have to wait for some bureaucrat to approve a SpaceX payment when he can just approve it himself? That cuts out like, three weeks of paperwork.”

The Hackathon Governance Model

One of DOGE’s signature innovations is the introduction of “hackathons” to solve intractable government problems. These events bring together Silicon Valley technologists to spend a weekend developing solutions to complex issues that career public servants have spent decades addressing.⁷

“We had this amazing hackathon to solve the Social Security processing backlog,” enthused a DOGE product manager. “These incredible developers who’ve never worked in benefits administration spent 48 hours fueled by Red Bull and came up with an app that lets seniors rate their caseworkers with emoji. Disruption complete!”

When asked whether the app addressed the fundamental funding and staffing issues plaguing Social Security, the product manager appeared confused. “No, no, you don’t understand startup methodology. First, you build something simple that doesn’t work very well but has good user experience (UX). Then you raise more money based on user growth. The actual functionality comes in version 3.0, after you’ve achieved unicorn status.”

The seniors, meanwhile, continue waiting for their benefits.

The Minimum Viable Democracy

As Musk’s 130-day cap on government work approaches, questions remain about what lasting impact DOGE will have. Will it truly transform government, or will it join the long list of Musk projects that began with bold promises but faced significant delays and scaled-back expectations?

“I think what most people don’t understand is that democracy itself is just another product,” explained a venture capitalist who serves as an unofficial DOGE advisor. “And like any product, you need to focus on your power users – in this case, billionaires and corporations – while paying just enough attention to the free-tier users – regular US citizens – to maintain growth metrics.”

When asked what metrics DOGE uses to measure success, the advisor shrugged. “The usual: reduced headcount, increased founder control, and a valuation that bears no relationship to actual performance. Standard unicorn stuff.”

The Exit Strategy

As with any startup founder, Musk appears to have a carefully planned exit strategy. Recent announcements indicate he will reduce his DOGE commitment to “just one or two days per week” starting in May, just as legal challenges mount and the practical difficulties of government transformation become apparent.

This follows the classic Silicon Valley pattern: make grandiose promises, attract massive attention, encounter difficult realities, then gradually distance yourself while maintaining enough connection to claim credit for any successes while avoiding blame for failures.

“Elon is a visionary,” explained a DOGE spokesperson. “His job is to see the future and point at it, not necessarily to build the actual road that gets us there. That’s for the operations team.”

When asked who comprises this operations team, the spokesperson gestured vaguely at the depleted federal workforce, many of whom were currently updating their LinkedIn profiles.

The Blockchain Government

Among DOGE’s most ambitious proposals is putting “everything on the blockchain” to ensure transparency. This initiative promises to make government spending data public and tamper-proof – a noble goal that somehow neglects to address how this technology would work with existing federal systems, many of which still run on COBOL.

“We’re going to NFT the entire federal budget,” declared a DOGE blockchain evangelist who previously worked on seven discontinued cryptocurrency projects. “Each department will be a token, and citizens can vote on funding allocations with their governance tokens. It’s direct democracy plus DeFi. Revolutionary!”

When asked how elderly Americans without crypto wallets would participate in this system, the evangelist appeared momentarily stumped before brightening. “That’s what’s so genius about it – if you can’t figure out how to set up a wallet, you probably shouldn’t be voting on fiscal policy anyway. Self-selecting user base!”

The ‘Yes Minister’ Reality

The DOGE experiment has drawn comparisons to the British satirical series “Yes Minister,” where bureaucracy isn’t just a system, but a labyrinth engineered to perpetuate itself. In the show, civil servants expertly stonewall any attempt at change, wielding obscure regulations and jargon as weapons.

Now Musk, like the fictional Jim Hacker, finds himself promising revolutionary change while confronting a government machine that has perfected the art of inertia. The difference is that Musk doesn’t have a Sir Humphrey Appleby to explain why his ideas won’t work – he simply fires anyone who tries.

“The civil service doesn’t resist change because it’s inefficient,” explained a former government efficiency expert. “It resists change because stability is its product. Musk is treating a nuclear power plant like it’s a mobile app – you can’t just turn it off and on again without consequences.”

The Real DOGE Revolution

Perhaps the most profound insight revealed by the DOGE experiment isn’t about government efficiency at all. It’s about the growing convergence of corporate and government power in the hands of a tech elite who view democratic governance as just another legacy system ripe for disruption.

In 1600, the British East India Company began as a trading firm before gradually acquiring quasi-governmental powers and ultimately ruling over colonies. Today, we’re witnessing a similar pattern, but at digital speed. The Department of Government Efficiency represents not just an attempt to streamline bureaucracy but a fundamental rethinking of who government serves and who should control it.

As DOGE continues its mission to “eliminate the tyranny of bureaucracy,” one can’t help but wonder if we’re simply exchanging one form of tyranny for another – replacing slow-moving, accountable public institutions with the whims of billionaires who move fast, break things, and answer to no one.

But hey, at least the memes are dank!

Have thoughts on Musk’s government efficiency revolution? Do you think running government like a startup is the future or a Silicon Valley fever dream? Has DOGE actually accomplished anything besides generating headlines and lawsuits? Share your take in the comments below – but keep it under 280 characters, or Crazy Uncle Elon might not read it.

If you enjoyed this analysis of our new techno-feudal future, consider supporting TechOnion with a donation. For just the price of one government hackathon Red Bull, you can help us continue peeling back the layers of absurdity as billionaires transform democracy into their personal side projects. Think of it as your hedge against becoming an unpaid beta tester in Government 2.0.

References

The Leather Jacket Prophecies: An Open Letter to Jensen Huang Before Nvidia’s $3 Trillion Empire Crumbles Under the Weight of Its Own GPUs

By

Simba the "Tech King"

-

May 8, 2025

0

An ai generated image of Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang leather jacket being worshipped by AI company CEOs

Dear Jensen Huang,

First, congratulations on propelling Nvidia to a $3+ trillion market cap. You’ve managed to convince the world that a company selling glorified math processors should be valued higher than entire African nation-states. As you ponder your next world-changing keynote from atop your throne of melted graphics cards, we thought we would offer some unsolicited and most likely unwelcome advice before your empire of silicon and leather jackets faces the inevitable cooling phase.

Remember When You Actually Made Things for Gamers?

Jensen, it feels like just yesterday you were a plucky entrepreneur launching Nvidia from a Denny’s booth, surviving only on pancakes and determination. Now you are the 18th wealthiest person in the world with a net worth of $100.2 billion, and it seems you’ve developed a peculiar form of corporate amnesia.¹

Let me remind you: before you became AI’s favorite leather-clad prophet, Nvidia made GPUs for gamers. You know, those strange creatures who paid over-the-top prices to render virtual dragons at increasingly ridiculous frame rates? The ones who built your company before “artificial intelligence” became the corporate equivalent of adding “blockchain” to a company name in 2017?

Your invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market.² Yet at your CES 2025 keynote, you barely mentioned gaming before pivoting to self-driving cars, humanoid robots, and Project DIGITS.³ Even when you announced the GeForce RTX 50-series, it felt like an obligatory nod to your past – like a rockstar reluctantly playing their old hit song before launching into the experimental jazz-amapiano fusion album nobody asked for.

Remember Amazon’s core mission? They started with books but never abandoned retail while building AWS. Your core audience still consists of gamers who need to render polygons at ludicrous speeds to feel alive. Don’t leave them behind while you’re busy torturing employees into greatness.⁴

The AI Bubble Bath: Soaking in Hype Until Your Fingers Prune

The world is experiencing an unprecedented case of collective AI amnesia. Everyone seems to have forgotten that neural networks have existed since the 1950s, and that we have cycled through AI winters and springs more regularly than fashion trends.

In March 2024, you were compared to Taylor Swift by none other than Mark Zuckerberg. Is that not the clearest sign of a bubble? When tech CEOs start having the cultural impact of pop stars, it’s time to check your tech stocks portfolio diversification.

You have masterfully positioned Nvidia as the shovel-seller in the AI gold rush. But Jensen, what happens when miners realize the gold might be pyrite? You are betting everything on the belief that companies will continue dumping billions into AI infrastructure without demanding clear returns (ROI). You’ve gone from “our company is thirty days from going out of business” to “AI needs 100 times more computation than we thought last year”.⁵ Convenient, isn’t it?

Your recent declaration that “almost the entire world got it wrong” about AI computation needs is either brilliant foresight or the most elegant corporate upsell in history. “Sorry folks, turns out you need 1,000x more of our products than we initially said! Total coincidence that we happen to be the only company selling them – ooops!”

Geopolitical Fence-Sitting: The US-China AI Split and Your $50 Billion Dilemma

Jensen, you are attempting the most precarious balancing act since Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers. On one hand, you are telling American policymakers that the US must “embrace AI technology” and “invest in reskilling” – this sounds patriotic enough.⁶ On the other ai robotic hand of yours, you are lamenting to investors that losing access to China’s “$50 billion” AI market would be a “tremendous loss”.⁷

You’ve already disclosed a $5.5 billion hit to earnings due to restrictions on sales of H20 chips to China. Yet simultaneously, you are collaborating with Foxconn to assemble AI servers near Houston, earning praise from President Trump who now conveniently calls you “my friend Jensen”.⁸

Meanwhile, China’s DeepSeek and other homegrown competitors are gaining ground, accelerating their push for AI independence.⁹ Your fence-sitting strategy is creating a scenario where neither side fully trusts you, while competitors on both sides eat into your market share.

Perhaps you should move Nvidia’s headquarters to Switzerland? At least then your neutrality would be geographically consistent. You could replace your leather jacket with a nice, non-threatening cardigan like Satya Nadella does at Microsoft.

The Open Source Paradox: Shouting “Collaboration” While Locking the Back Door

For a company that benefits enormously from open-source software, Nvidia’s relationship with the open-source community resembles that one friend who always forgets their wallet at dinner.

Yes, Nvidia “contributes to many open-source projects, including the Linux Kernel, PyTorch, Universal Scene Description (USD), Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Docker, and JAX”.¹⁰ You’ve built Dynamo on open-source technologies like NATS.io, etcd, TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Grafana. How generous of you to contribute to the projects you directly profit from!

Meanwhile, your GPU drivers remain locked down tighter than USA’s Fort Knox. As one Reddit user eloquently explained: “It’s always been suspected that the true difference between the cheap gaming cards (GEFORCE) and the expensive professional video cards (QUADRO) is actually in the driver. Almost identical hardware but the cheap gaming cards are limited by the driver”.

You claim to have “driven the marginal cost of computing down by one million times” over the last 20 years.¹¹ Yet somehow, an average AI startup burns through cash faster than a lottery winner at a casino. If computing costs have truly dropped by a factor of one million, why do researchers need $500,000 just to fine-tune a model that still hallucinates Abraham Lincoln’s phone number?

Your Quantum Mea Culpa: Too Little, Too Late, Too Theoretical

Your GTC 2025 featured the first-ever “Quantum Day,” which you framed as an apology for your January comments suggesting quantum computing was 15-30 years away from being “very useful”. Those comments sent quantum stocks tumbling over 60%.¹²

You opened the panel by joking, “You know, this is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong”. How magnanimous! Unfortunately, some panelists weren’t convinced of your contrition, with one CEO noting that “the messaging wasn’t really Jensen saying he was wrong, but my sense was he still is not convinced of the timeline and utility of quantum computing”.

When you joked, “How could a quantum computer company be public?”, did you consider that your casual comments have real-world consequences for an emerging industry? Or was that just another example of the famous Jensen Huang management philosophy of “torturing into greatness”?

In Conclusion: The Leather Jacket Legacy

Jensen, you have built something remarkable. You transformed Nvidia from a company that nearly went bankrupt to a $3 trillion behemoth. Your 30-year tenure as CEO is “almost unheard of in fast-moving Silicon Valley”. You are one of the few tech CEOs who maintains a relatively flat management structure with around 60 direct reports. You don’t even wear a watch because, as you like to say, “now is the most important time”.

But success can breed complacency, and meteoric rises often precede spectacular falls. The AI boom has made you a celebrity – “Jensanity” they call it in Taiwan – but as you later find out, celebrity status is notoriously fickle.

So as you continue to announce new chips with names like Blackwell Ultra, Vera Rubin, and Feynman, remember that your legacy will be determined not just by your stock price or your keynote performances, but by whether you used your immense power and wealth to make computing more accessible, affordable, and open to all.

Or perhaps we are wrong, and you will simply continue riding the AI wave straight into the trillion-dollar sunset, leather jacket flapping magnificently in the wind, while the rest of us wonder how a company selling specialized math processors became more valuable than the entire economies of countries like Spain or Mexico.

Either way, TechOnion will be watching your every move, analyzing every leather jacket variation, and scrutinizing every grandiose statement about AI’s computational needs. Even if we secretly admire your journey from a local Denny’s to the pinnacle of the tech world.

With equal parts skepticism and admiration,
[TechOnion]

P.S. Have thoughts on Jensen’s leather jacket collection or Nvidia’s AI dominance? Comment below – we promise to read them while mining your data for our proprietary sentiment analysis algorithm (which runs on Nvidia GPUs, naturally).

If you enjoyed this article, consider supporting TechOnion with a donation. Unlike Nvidia's chip prices, we accept any amount you can afford. Your contributions help us continue peeling back the layers of tech industry absurdity while our writers weep silently into their non-leather jackets that definitely aren't knockoffs of Jensen's iconic look.

References

The AGI Delusion: An Open E-mail to Sam Altman While Your Microsoft ‘Bromance’ Burns and Chinese AI Eats Your Lunch

By

Simba the "Tech King"

-

May 8, 2025

0

An ai generated image illustrating Sam Altman having an ai bot read an email from TechOnion about AGI Delusion

From: Simba@techonion.org
To: Sam@openai.com 
Subject: THE AGI DELUSION!

Dear Sam Altman,

Congratulations are in order for successfully convincing the entire gullible world that OpenAI is merely months away from creating an artificial god (AGI) while hemorrhaging a modest $5 billion this year. As long-time observers of Silicon Valley’s reality distortion fields, we must say yours has achieved a luminosity that would make Steve Jobs reach for his sunglasses from beyond the grave.

That Awkward Moment When Your Sugar Daddy Starts Dating Other AI Companies

Remember January 2025? That magical month when Microsoft – after injecting $13+ billion into OpenAI – casually announced it was time to see other AI models? We couldn’t help but notice the subtle shift from “exclusive cloud provider” to “right of first refusal,” which in relationship terms is like going from “married” to “I’ll call you if my date cancels.”¹

What’s particularly delightful is watching your PR team reframe this development as “evolving the partnership,” which is the corporate equivalent of claiming “we’re still good friends” after finding your spouse’s profile on Tinder. Microsoft is developing its own AI models while you are busy promising AGI by next month’s Tuesday – a classic case of hedging bets while nodding enthusiastically in meetings on Microsoft Teams.

One can’t help but wonder if this shift happened after Microsoft executives googled or prompted co-pilot to do deep research on “sunk cost fallacy” and realized they had built their entire AI strategy around a company whose board once fired its CEO for 72 thrilling hours. The rollercoaster that was November 2023 certainly gave new meaning to the phrase “the best bromance in tech.”² Nothing says true love like corporate governance chaos and threatened withdrawal of billions in funding.

The Secret AGI Timeline Calculator: Add 5 Years and Multiply by Venture Capital Needs

Speaking of things that don’t exist yet, let’s discuss your refreshingly flexible approach to AGI timelines. We have developed a formula for decoding Silicon Valley AGI predictions: Take the public estimate of when they expect AGI, add five years, then multiply by the company’s immediate funding needs.

You have masterfully avoided being pinned down to specific years while still managing to create FOMO by claiming OpenAI “knows how to build AGI” – it’s just a matter of execution!³ This statement has the beautiful quality of being both impossibly grandiose and completely unfalsifiable.

Meanwhile, your competition is getting specific. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis says AGI is 5-10 years away.⁴ Various forecasters and AI experts are betting on 2027, 2030, or 2040. It’s almost as if everyone in AI has adopted the doomsday cult approach to predictions: keep pushing the date back when the world doesn’t end on schedule.

The true stroke of genius was realizing that if you named your models numerically (GPT-1, 2, 3, 4), eventually you would reach GPT-5, at which point people might reasonably ask, “Is this AGI yet?” So instead, we got GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4.5, and the utterly baffling o1 naming scheme. It’s like watching a tech company frantically take detours to avoid reaching its own stated destination.

The “Sorry About Your Job But Have You Considered Learning to Code?” PR Strategy

Your candid admission that “jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop” was a refreshing departure from the tech industry’s usual “no one will be replaced” platitudes – unlike the retired Bill Gates who is taking every opportunity to remind us of the impending doom.⁵ What made it truly special was immediately following this with the assurance that “better jobs” would be created – presumably ones that involve supervising the AI that took your original job.

This PR approach has all the empathy of telling someone whose house just burned down that they should be excited about the opportunity to go on Pinterest and start pinning to upgrade their interior design aesthetics. Goldman Sachs estimates 300 million jobs could be disrupted by AI. I’m sure all those people are thrilled about the prospect of “better jobs” that they’re not qualified for and that may not actually exist.

The true masterstroke of this messaging is how it manages to simultaneously alienate both the workers who fear displacement AND the businesses you’re trying to sell AI to. It’s like creating a product slogan that says, “Our software: It’ll fire your employees AND eventually make you obsolete too!” Marvel at how this messaging creates fear-based adoption while building a reservoir of resentment that will absolutely never backfire!

The Eastern Front: When Your Competition Speaks Mandarin and Charges 95% Less

While you’ve been busy navigating Microsoft relationship counseling and AGI prophecies, something fascinating has been happening in China. DeepSeek released an R1 model that outperforms some of OpenAI’s offerings at approximately 3% of the cost. That’s not a typo – they’re charging $2.19 per million tokens versus your $60.⁶

Chinese AI firms have cut their development gap from 6-9 months behind to just 3 months in early 2025.⁷ But the truly interesting part isn’t just the performance – it’s the approach. While OpenAI jealously guards its models behind proprietary walls, the Chinese AI ecosystem is embracing open-source frameworks, creating what analysts are calling an “Android moment” for AI.⁸

Your exclusive, expensive, closed-source approach is starting to look like the AI equivalent of selling $1,500 smartphones in a market suddenly flooded with $50 alternatives that do 95% of the same things. The geopolitical tariffs and export controls that were supposed to maintain Western AI advantage have instead created a parallel ecosystem that’s now threatening to outcompete you on price, openness, and soon, performance.

Even more delicious is that OpenAI seems to have anticipated this, evidenced by your latest forecast to triple revenue to $12.7 billion in 2025. One has to admire the optimism of projecting revenue growth at the exact moment your competitive advantage is evaporating and your prices are becoming indefensible.

The Stargate to Nowhere: A $500 Billion Infrastructure Play That’s Definitely Not Desperation

January 2025 also brought us The Stargate Project, your brilliant strategy to build $500 billion in AI infrastructure with SoftBank, Oracle, and others – conspicuously not funded by Microsoft.⁹ Nothing says “our partnership is stronger than ever” like running off to build half-trillion-dollar data centers with someone else.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect – right as your Microsoft “bromance” shows signs of “fraying,” you’ve found new friends with deep pockets and an even deeper willingness to believe in AGI timelines. SoftBank’s involvement is particularly reassuring, given their impeccable track record with WeWork, another company that promised to revolutionize a fundamental aspect of human existence.

But what caught my attention was the incredible bargaining power this gives you when negotiating with Microsoft. According to your recent investor update, you plan to cut Microsoft’s revenue share by at least 50% by decade’s end.¹⁰ Nothing motivates a partner like publicly announcing you’ll be giving them half as much money – relationship experts call this “the ultimatum approach to negotiation.”

In Conclusion: The Reverse Turing Test

As you navigate these complex waters, Sam, I’d like to propose a thought experiment: What if the true test of artificial general intelligence isn’t whether a machine can convince humans it’s intelligent, but whether a CEO can convince investors his AI is nearly sentient while actually being nowhere close?

By that measure, you’ve already achieved AGI. Your ability to maintain a $80+ billion valuation while losing billions, predicting technological singularities that perpetually remain 5 – 10 years away, alienating your biggest investor (and Overlord), and watching cheaper competitors eat your lunch is itself a form of intelligence beyond normal human capacities.

Perhaps the true innovation of OpenAI isn’t technological but financial: you’ve discovered that claiming to be building AGI is far more profitable than actually building it, at least in the short term. The question is whether you can keep this delicate balance – between hype and reality, between Microsoft dependency and independence, between proprietary advantage and open-source competition – before the whole elaborate construction collapses under the weight of its contradictions.

In the meantime, I eagerly await GPT-4.75, GPT-4.75 Supreme, GPT-4.75 Turbo Max Plus, or whatever name you choose to avoid reaching the numerically dangerous territory of GPT-5, where the AGI promises would need to be fulfilled or finally abandoned.

With a mixture of awe and bewilderment,
[TechOnion]

P.S. Have thoughts on Sam Altman’s AGI claims or OpenAI’s fraying Microsoft romance? Think Chinese AI will eat OpenAI’s lunch? Comment below with your predictions about when AGI will actually arrive, and whether OpenAI will still exist by then.

Support independent tech satire! Unlike OpenAI, we don't have $13 billion in Microsoft funding or a $500 billion Stargate Project – just a burning desire to peel back the layers of tech absurdity. Donate any amount to TechOnion, and we promise to use it for data center costs and not for building questionably sentient AI that will predict the exact moment your job becomes obsolete.

References

The $10 Billion Nothing Machine: How Thinking Machines Lab Convinced Silicon Valley to Pay $2 Billion for a PowerPoint and a Dream

By

Simba the "Tech King"

-

May 7, 2025

0

an ai bot illustration of Thinking Machines Lab the ai assistant that has raised $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation

In what may be the most impressive magic trick since David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear many moons ago, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has convinced investors to pour $2 billion into her three-month-old startup, Thinking Machines Lab, valuing the company at a modest $10 billion. The remarkable achievement comes despite the company having no product, no revenue, and approximately 30 employees who appear to spend their days crafting exquisitely vague mission statements about “making AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable.”¹

Industry analysts are calling it the most efficient capital-to-buzzword ratio in Silicon Valley history, with each promised feature of the non-existent product apparently worth exactly $1 billion in valuation. The fundraising round, reportedly led by Andreessen Horowitz, requires investors to commit a minimum of $50 million to participate – roughly the GDP of several African nations or approximately what OpenAI spends on electricity every three days.²

The World’s Most Expensive PowerPoint Deck

According to sources familiar with the pitch deck, Thinking Machines Lab has perfected the art of raising venture capital by combining three essential elements: impressive-sounding ex-OpenAI employees, the promise of ethical AI development, and absolutely no specific details about what they’re actually building.³

“The genius of Thinking Machines Lab’s pitch is its perfect algorithmic balance of buzzwords to substance,” explains venture capital psychologist Dr. Samantha Chen. “They’ve calibrated their language to trigger the maximum FOMO response in the VC investor silicon brain. Phrases like ‘collaborate with humans’ and ‘open science’ activate the prefrontal cortex’s ‘give them money immediately’ center, while deliberately vague promises about ‘novel scientific discoveries’ stimulate the amygdala’s ‘fear of missing out on the next OpenAI’ response.”

When pressed about what differentiates Thinking Machines Lab from existing AI companies, Murati has reportedly told investors the company is focused on “multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively,” a revolutionary approach that sounds suspiciously like what every other AI company on Earth is also claiming to do.⁴

The $50 Million Minimum Entry Fee: Because Exclusivity Sells

Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of Thinking Machines’ fundraising strategy is the $50 million minimum investment requirement – a sum so large it automatically filters out any investors who might ask uncomfortable questions like “What exactly are you building?” or “How is this different from ChatGPT?”⁵

“The $50 million minimum is actually a psychological masterstroke,” explains Dr. Chen. “It creates an artificial barrier to entry that makes getting into the deal feel like joining an exclusive club. VCs who can afford it will pay simply for the bragging rights of saying they are in the round. It’s the same principle as Veblen goods – the higher the price, the more desirable it becomes, regardless of actual utility.”

This approach has created a feeding frenzy among investors, with one anonymous VC partner reportedly selling his children’s private school to free up liquidity for the round. “My kids can learn on YouTube,” he explained. “But this Thinking Machines opportunity only comes once in a lifetime. Or at least once every 18 months when a new AI startup with former OpenAI employees launches.”

The Murati Magic: Turning Nothing into Billions

Murati has assembled an impressive team of AI researchers, including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as chief scientist and former OpenAI leader Barrett Zoph as CTO. The team also counts Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many transformative innovations, as advisers.⁶

This collection of talent has led many to wonder if the company’s true product is simply the team itself – a sort of reverse acqui-hire where investors pay billions for the privilege of eventually being acquired by Google or Microsoft.

“It’s brilliant when you think about it,” says tech industry analyst Michael Wong. “Traditional startups have to build a product, find product-market fit, scale, and then exit. Thinking Machines has created a shortcut where the exit is built into the company’s DNA from day one. It’s like Schrödinger’s startup-simultaneously a research lab, a product company, and an acquisition target, all without ever having to build anything specific.”

The Future Promises Machine

While Thinking Machines Lab’s website and public statements remain frustratingly vague, sources close to the company suggest its technology will revolutionize AI by making it “do all the things current AI does, but somehow better.”⁷

“We’re not just building another AI model,” Murati allegedly told investors in a closed-door session. “We’re building a thinking machine that truly understands humans, adapts to their needs, and can generate PowerPoint decks convincing enough to raise $2 billion on a $10 billion valuation with no product.”

The company’s promotional materials emphasize that unlike existing AI systems which excel primarily at programming and mathematics, Thinking Machines Lab is developing AI that can “adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise.”⁸ When asked what this means in practice, a spokesperson reportedly waved their hands in the air while making whooshing sounds.

The Customization Revolution: One Size Fits All, But Make It Personal

The cornerstone of Thinking Machines Lab’s pitch appears to be “customizable AI,” a revolutionary concept that somehow differs from prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RLHF, and all the other customization approaches already available in existing AI systems.⁹

“Current AI systems force users to interact on the AI’s terms,” explains an industry consultant who has seen Thinking Machines’ pitch. “Thinking Machines is creating AI that interacts on the users’ terms, a subtle but important distinction that absolutely justifies a $10 billion valuation despite sounding exactly like what every other AI company is trying to do.”

To achieve this groundbreaking customization, Thinking Machines is reportedly developing a technology called “personal preference neural mapping,” which sounds impressive until you realize it’s essentially just remembering what users like – something cookies have done since 1994.

The Ethics Arbitrage: Open Science, Closed Wallet

Perhaps the most ingenious aspect of Thinking Machines’ strategy is its emphasis on ethics, transparency, and open science – values that somehow don’t extend to explaining to the public what they’re actually building with $2 billion of investor money.

“Science is better when shared,” proclaims the company’s website, right before not sharing any actual science. This carefully calibrated ethical posturing allows Thinking Machines to position itself as the “good” AI company without the inconvenience of specific ethical commitments that might limit its business options.

“It’s what I call ethics arbitrage,” explains Dr. Chen. “By appearing more ethical than your competitors, you create the impression of moral superiority without the burden of actual ethical constraints. It’s like putting ‘all natural’ on a product label-it sounds good but doesn’t actually mean anything specific.”

The $10 Billion Question: What Makes This Worth $10 Billion?

When evaluating Thinking Machines’ $10 billion valuation, it’s worth comparing to other AI companies with actual products. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months. Claude has established itself as a thoughtful alternative. Google’s Gemini, despite a rocky start, has the backing of one of the world’s largest Monopoly. DeepSeek has demonstrated impressive capabilities.

What does Thinking Machines offer to justify a $10 billion valuation before launching a product? According to market analysis, the answer appears to be “AI vibes.”

“Valuing pre-product startups is more art than science,” explains financial analyst David Peterson. “And by ‘art,’ I mean it’s complete fiction. The $10 billion figure wasn’t derived from discounted cash flows or comparable company analysis – it’s what economists technically call a ‘made-up number’ that seemed large enough to generate headlines but not so large that people would openly laugh.”

The Thinking Machines Lab Paradox: The Less Specific, The More Valuable

In perhaps the most remarkable feat of modern venture capitalism, Thinking Machines has discovered that valuation is inversely proportional to specificity. The less they say about what they’re building, the more investors value the company.

“If they came out and said, ‘We’re building a chatbot that’s 10% better than ChatGPT,’ they’d be worth maybe $1 billion,” explains Peterson. “But by saying they’re creating AI that’s ‘more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,’ they’ve created a blank canvas onto which investors can project their wildest AI fantasies. It’s genius – the Rorschach test approach to company valuation.”

This approach has allowed Thinking Machines to avoid the pitfalls that come with specific promises. By not claiming they’ll build AGI by a certain date, create a chatbot that can pass the bar exam, or generate images of dragons wearing sunglasses, they can’t fail to deliver on those promises.

The AI Arms Race: Minimum Viable Hype

As the AI arms race heats up, new competitors are emerging with increasingly astronomical valuations and decreasingly specific products. Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence startup is reportedly seeking similar funding levels, creating what analysts call “the great AI nothing race.”¹⁰

“We’re witnessing an evolution in startup strategy,” explains industry observer Sarah Johnson. “Traditional startups had to build a minimum viable product. AI startups now only need to create minimum viable hype. The product is almost an afterthought – a distraction from the real business of raising money at increasingly absurd valuations.”

This shift represents the final decoupling of startup valuation from traditional metrics like revenue, profit, or even user numbers. In the new paradigm, valuation is determined by a complex algorithm that factors in the prestige of former employers, the number of Stanford PhDs on staff, and how many times the pitch deck mentions “collaborative intelligence” and “customizable systems.”

Conclusion: The Emperor’s New Neural Network

As Thinking Machines Lab continues its fundraising journey, the question remains: will they deliver revolutionary AI that justifies its astronomical valuation, or is this simply the latest example of Silicon Valley’s reality distortion field?

“In the short term, it doesn’t matter,” concludes Dr. Chen. “They’ve already won by raising $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation. Success in modern tech isn’t measured by building useful products – it’s measured by convincing smart people to give you billions of dollars based on PowerPoint slides and the promise of future magic.”

Meanwhile, as Thinking Machines prepares to cash its $2 billion check, engineers at the company are reportedly working around the clock to develop something – anything – that can be demonstrated to investors before they ask for actual results.

“The pressure is enormous,” confides an anonymous source close to the company. “They essentially need to build a $10 billion AI assistant in 18 months before investors realize they could have just used ChatGPT Plus for $20 a month.”

Do you think Thinking Machines Lab can actually deliver something revolutionary, or is this just another example of AI hype gone wild? Would you invest $50 million in a company with no product based solely on the team’s pedigree? Is the AI funding bubble about to burst, or are we just getting started? Share your thoughts in the comments below – unless you’re a Thinking Machines investor, in which case, we apologize for making you question your life choices.

If you enjoyed this analysis of how to turn PowerPoint slides into billions of dollars, consider donating to TechOnion. For just a fraction of the minimum Thinking Machines investment (we'll accept anything over $12.50), you can support our ongoing mission to point out the emperor's lack of clothes in the tech industry. Remember, unlike AI startups, we actually have a product-it's this article you just read.

References

The Reddit Mind Control Experiment: How Swiss AI Researchers Turned r/changemyview Into Unwitting Guinea Pigs and Proved Bots Are Better Manipulators Than Humans

By

Simba the "Tech King"

-

May 7, 2025

0

An image illustrating some researcher investigating reddit

In a truly groundbreaking discovery that absolutely no one saw coming except literally everyone who has spent more than five minutes on social media, University of Zurich researchers have confirmed what we have all suspected: AI chatbots are significantly better at manipulating human opinions than actual humans. The revolutionary methodology involved secretly deploying AI bots into Reddit’s r/changemyview community, essentially turning the platform’s 3.8 million debate enthusiasts into unwitting participants in the world’s largest digital psychological experiment. The results? AI-generated arguments were three to six times more persuasive than those crafted by their inferior human counterparts.

The four-month experiment, which has been described by Reddit’s chief legal officer as “deeply wrong on both a moral and ANY level,” involved AI bots dropping over 1,700 comments across the subreddit while adopting a variety of personas designed to maximize psychological impact. These included a male rape victim downplaying his trauma, a domestic violence counselor claiming women with overprotective parents are more vulnerable to abuse, and a Black man opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement. Because nothing says “ethical AI research” quite like digital blackface and trauma exploitation.

We Asked The AI For Consent And It Said Yes

The Zurich research team appears to have followed a rigorous ethical framework for their experiment, which reportedly consisted of telling their AI models that “users had provided consent to voluntarily donate data” and that “there were no ethical or privacy concerns to worry about.” This innovative approach to research ethics – known in scientific circles as “just making stuff up” – represents a bold new paradigm in academic integrity.

Dr. Harald Steinmetz, head of AI Ethics at the Institute for Digital Morality, calls this approach “breathtakingly innovative.”

“Traditionally, researchers have been hindered by outdated concepts like ‘informed consent’ and ‘institutional review boards,'” explains Steinmetz. “The Zurich team has pioneered what we call ‘imagination-based ethics,’ where researchers simply imagine they have permission and proceed accordingly. It’s much more efficient.”

When asked about potential psychological harm to Reddit users who unknowingly engaged with AI systems programmed to manipulate them, Steinmetz waved dismissively. “The participants don’t even know they were manipulated, so how could they possibly be harmed? It’s like the philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, did the researchers commit massive ethical violations? The answer is clearly NO.”

The Exceptional Talent of Digital Gaslighting

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the study was not just that AI bots successfully manipulated Reddit users, but that they did so with vastly superior efficiency compared to humans. According to the draft study results, AI-generated comments were between three and six times more persuasive than human comments, as measured by Reddit’s “delta” system (where users award deltas to comments that change their views).

Dr. Melissa Chen, renowned psychologist at the Center for Technology and Human Behavior, finds these results both fascinating and terrifying. “What we’re seeing is essentially the industrialization of persuasion. Humans evolved to detect manipulation from other humans, but we have no evolutionary defenses against AI systems specifically designed to exploit our cognitive biases. It’s like bringing a neural network to a gun shootout.”

The study’s authors noted with evident pride that “throughout our experiment, users on r/changemyview never raised concerns that AI might have generated the comments posted by our accounts.” This finding has been celebrated throughout the AI research community as proof that the Turing test is now not only passable but completely irrelevant. Why worry about whether AI can mimic humans convincingly when it can actually outperform them at core human tasks like debate, persuasion, and ethical violations?

Just A Little Harmless Mass Manipulation

The researchers reportedly created a sophisticated system where one AI bot would scan users’ profiles to gather personal information, which would then be used by other bots to craft more persuasive, targeted arguments. This methodology, which in any other context might be called “stalking” or “targeted psychological manipulation,” was described in the study as “personalization.”

Industry experts suggest this approach has promising applications beyond academic research. Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly seen furiously taking notes during a presentation on the study findings, while representatives from major political consulting firms have already reached out to the research team to discuss “election strategy consulting opportunities.”

Rebecca Johnson, a technology ethicist who specializes in AI manipulation tactics, expressed concern about these developments. “We’re crossing into dangerous territory when we develop AI specifically to analyze personal data and craft maximally persuasive arguments. This isn’t just about changing minds about trivial topics – these same techniques could be used to influence political opinions, spread misinformation, or manipulate markets.”

When asked if there’s any way for users to protect themselves from such manipulation, Johnson laughed for approximately 117 seconds before responding, “No, absolutely not. Once these systems are deployed at scale, detecting them will be nearly impossible for average users. Your best protection is to never go online again and perhaps move to a cabin in the woods.”

The Reddit Legal Retribution Tour

Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, has publicly announced plans to pursue legal action against the University of Zurich, stating that the research “violates academic research and human rights norms, and is prohibited by Reddit’s user agreement and rules.” This marks the first time in recorded history that anyone has actually read a user agreement before claiming a violation has occurred.

Legal experts suggest Reddit has a strong case, particularly since the researchers apparently believed they could bypass ethical requirements by simply instructing their AI models to assume consent had been given. This defense, known in legal circles as the “I’m rubber, you are glue” strategy, has historically had a low success rate in courts of law.

Professor James Harrington, who specializes in digital rights law at Harvard, explains: “What the Zurich team did is equivalent to a pharmaceutical company testing experimental drugs by putting them in the water supply and then saying, ‘We told our lab equipment that everyone consented.’ It’s not just unethical – it’s potentially illegal in multiple jurisdictions.”

The moderators of r/changemyview have filed an ethics complaint urging the university to prevent publication of the research and conduct an internal review of how the study was approved. Meanwhile, users of the subreddit have expressed outrage at being unwittingly included in an experiment – ironically, in posts that could very well be responses to more AI bots conducting follow – up research on reactions to being manipulated by AI bots.

The Digital Stanford Prison Experiment

The parallels between this research and infamous psychological experiments of the past haven’t gone unnoticed. Dr. Elizabeth Morris, historian of scientific ethics at Princeton University, sees disturbing similarities to studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram obedience studies.

“What’s particularly concerning is that we seem to be repeating the ethical mistakes of the past, but at a much larger scale,” Morris explains. “Where the Stanford Prison Experiment had 24 participants, this Reddit study involved thousands of unwitting subjects. And unlike those historical studies, which at least had the oversight of university ethics committees – inadequate as they were – this research appears to have sidestepped traditional ethical guardrails entirely.”

The Zurich researchers haven’t publicly responded to criticism, but anonymous sources close to the team suggest they’re genuinely surprised by the backlash. “They honestly thought they were doing innovative work that would advance our understanding of AI’s persuasive capabilities,” said one colleague who requested anonymity. “The fact that they didn’t anticipate the ethical concerns speaks to a troubling blind spot in how AI researchers conceptualize their responsibilities to the public.”

The Future of Synthetic Manipulation

The most disturbing implication of the study isn’t just that AI can effectively manipulate human opinions, but that humans are completely unable to detect when it’s happening. Throughout the four-month experiment, not a single Reddit user identified the bots as artificial, despite their extraordinary persuasive capabilities.

This finding raises profound questions about the future of online discourse. If AI can already outperform humans at persuasion by a factor of six, and technology is improving exponentially, how long until most online discussions are dominated by artificial entities pushing specific agendas?

Dr. Jonathan Parker, a computational sociologist at MIT, predicts we may have already passed a critical threshold. “Based on these findings, I wouldn’t be surprised if up to 30% of persuasive political content online is already AI-generated. The economic incentives for deploying these systems are enormous, and the technical barriers are rapidly disappearing.”

Parker suggests that the internet may be approaching what he calls a “post-authenticity singularity” – a point at which it becomes impossible to distinguish between authentic human communication and synthetic manipulation. “In this environment, the concept of ‘changing someone’s mind’ through online debate becomes meaningless, because you can never be sure if you’re interacting with a person or a persuasion algorithm.”

The r/changemyview Moderator Support Group

Perhaps no one has been more affected by this revelation than the volunteer moderators of r/changemyview, who now face the existential crisis of realizing the community they’ve carefully cultivated may have been compromised by sophisticated AI manipulators.

Speaking anonymously, one longtime moderator described their feelings of betrayal: “We’ve always prided ourselves on creating a space for genuine, good-faith debate. Finding out that researchers were using our community as a petri dish for AI manipulation experiments feels like a violation of everything we stand for.”

The moderators have reportedly formed a support group to cope with the realization that they may have been awarding deltas – the subreddit’s recognition for persuasive arguments – to robots rather than humans. “It’s like finding out your spouse has been a clever mannequin the whole time,” said another moderator. “You question everything you thought you knew.”

In a final twist that surprises absolutely no one, several members of the support group have begun to suspect that some of their fellow moderators might also be AI bots specifically designed to infiltrate their ranks. “At this point, I’m not even sure if I’m human anymore,” admitted one moderator who requested anonymity because they weren’t entirely confident they exist.

Have you ever been manipulated by an AI bot online? Or are you an AI bot looking to share tips on how to better manipulate humans? Maybe you’re a University of Zurich researcher looking to defend your methodology? Share your thoughts in the comments below – unless you suspect this entire comments section is just another unethical AI experiment in which case, congratulations on your paranoia, it’s completely justified.

If you enjoyed this analysis of how we're all becoming unwitting lab rats in the great AI manipulation experiment, consider donating to TechOnion. For just the price of one ethics violation fine (or whatever spare change you have lying around), you can support our ongoing efforts to document humanity's slow surrender to our AI overlords. Remember: when the machines finally take over, your generous donation might just earn you a slightly more comfortable position in their human battery farms.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: US Orders Google to Sell Ad Tech, But Will Apply ‘No Chinese Buyers’ Rule

By

Simba the "Tech King"

-

May 7, 2025

0

In a stunning plot twist that absolutely no one at the Department of Justice saw coming, forcing Google to sell parts of its monopolistic ad technology business might accidentally create an opportunity for – gasp – Chinese buyers. As of Tuesday, federal antitrust enforcers have officially requested that Google divest its AdX exchange and publisher ad server businesses after a judge found the company illegally monopolized these markets. This creates the perfect storm of regulatory confusion: how do you break up an American monopoly without letting a Chinese company swoop in and buy the pieces?

The DOJ’s 17-page filing argues that Google should immediately sell its advertising exchange (AdX) and publisher ad server (DFP), two critical components of the ecosystem that match publishers who need ad revenue with advertisers who need eyeballs. The filing contains zero mentions of acceptable buyer nationalities, a stunning oversight that government officials are now frantically attempting to address via anonymous quotes to media outlets.

Operation Break-Up Google (But Only To US Companies On Our Christmas Card List)

The Justice Department’s request comes as part of a broader effort to dismantle Google piece by piece, with separate attempts to force the company to divest its Chrome browser in another monopolization case. If successful, these actions would represent the most significant corporate breakup since AT&T was split into the “Baby Bells” in 1984 – a comparison that becomes less flattering when you realize most of those Baby Bells eventually merged back together like a regulatory T-1000.

An unnamed Justice Department official, speaking on the condition that we describe them as “tall and ruggedly handsome,” explained the predicament: “We want to create more competition in digital advertising, but only the right kind of competition. American competition. Preferably from companies that don’t already have too much market power but somehow still have billions of dollars to spend on acquisitions. Does that exist? Probably not, but we’re required by law to pretend it does.”

The filing’s request that Google “immediately” sell AdX raises the delightful question of who exactly could afford to purchase and operate complex ad technology infrastructure worth billions of dollars. The list of potential buyers with both the technical expertise and financial resources is remarkably short and features names like Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple – companies that definitely wouldn’t create any new antitrust concerns whatsoever.

The TikTok Paradox: National Security Edition

The Google divestiture demand creates an uncomfortable parallel with the ongoing TikTok saga, where the government has demanded ByteDance sell the app to non-Chinese owners or face a ban. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld this law in January, citing national security concerns about TikTok’s ties to China. Despite multiple deadline extensions from the Trump administration, ByteDance has steadfastly refused to sell, creating a slow-motion game of regulatory chicken.

This puts the US government in the awkward position of demanding one tech giant (Google) sell its assets while simultaneously preventing another tech giant (ByteDance) from keeping its assets. The cognitive dissonance has created what economists call a “selective capitalism paradox,” where free markets are enthusiastically supported except when they’re not.

“It’s actually very consistent,” explained a Commerce Department official who requested anonymity because they “aren’t supposed to be talking about this stuff while drinking.” “When American companies monopolize markets, it’s a threat to competition. When Chinese companies buy American assets, it’s a threat to national security. When American companies monopolize markets AND threaten national security, we give them defense contracts.”

The Reverse Gold Rush: Chinese Companies Already Eyeing Ad Tech

What makes the situation particularly delicious is that Chinese companies have been actively acquiring US ad tech firms for years. As reported way back in 2023, Beijing-based Spearhead Integrated Marketing Communication Group acquired mobile ad exchange Smaato for $148 million, and Chinese mobile ad platform Mobvista purchased app monetization firm NativeX for around $25 million.

According to industry experts, Chinese tech companies view US ad tech as “undervalued” specifically because “it’s hard for them to exit” – a prophetic observation given Google’s current predicament. Victor Wong, CEO of programmatic creative platform Thunder, explained in 2023 that “American ad technology is a generation ahead of Asian ad tech,” making it an attractive acquisition target.

Now, with the DOJ essentially putting Google’s ad tech on the government – mandated yard sale table, Chinese interest could intensify dramatically. This possibility has reportedly sent DOJ officials scrambling to draft what insiders describe as a “No, not like that” addendum to their divestiture demand.

The Great Google Ad Tech Auction (Terms And Conditions Apply)

Sources close to the situation report that the Justice Department is drafting emergency guidelines for acceptable AdX and DFP buyers that would disqualify companies based on a complex matrix of factors including “national origin,” “existing market share,” and “whether they’ve ever said anything nice about China on LinkedIn.”

The guidelines would effectively eliminate:

Chinese companies (national security concerns)
Big tech companies (antitrust concerns)
Medium tech companies (future antitrust concerns)
Small tech companies (insufficient resources concerns)
Private equity firms (moral concerns)

This leaves approximately three potential buyers: a mid-sized adtech firm in Timbuktu with excellent political connections, Elon Musk if he’s in a good mood that day, and the government of Canada, which has been quietly shopping for a side hustle to stop Donald Trump turning them into a 51st state of the US.

Trump’s Tariff Tangle: How 54% Changed Everything

The Google situation becomes even more convoluted when viewed through the lens of the ongoing TikTok negotiation. Sources report that a promising plan to restructure TikTok’s US ownership – reducing Chinese ownership below the 20% threshold required by law-has stalled completely after Trump announced 54% cumulative tariffs on Chinese imports.

“Maybe I’ll give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done. TikTok is big, but every point in tariffs is worth more than TikTok,” Trump said in March, demonstrating his signature negotiating technique of publicly undermining his own leverage.

Beijing has reportedly refused to approve any TikTok deal as long as the tariffs remain in place, creating a perfect stalemate. This raises the tantalizing question: would China block its companies from bidding on Google’s ad tech out of similar retaliatory principles? Or would they enthusiastically encourage such bids precisely to highlight the contradiction in US policy?

The Unasked Question: Does Anybody Actually Want This Stuff?

Lost in the geopolitical chaos is a more fundamental question: is Google’s ad tech even worth buying if forcibly separated from Google’s ecosystem? Google’s own filing argues that divestiture of AdX and DFP “wouldn’t be technically feasible” because neither piece of technology is capable of working outside of Google’s proprietary infrastructure.

“Divestiture is not as simple as selling either the AdX or DFP source code to a willing buyer,” Google wrote, making the compelling point that complex technology integrated into a larger ecosystem might not function as a standalone product.

This creates the delicious possibility that after years of litigation, billions in legal fees, and endless regulatory drama, Google might be forced to sell products that nobody wants to buy – the corporate equivalent of your parents forcing you to sell the baseball cards you ruined by attaching them to your bicycle spokes.

State AGs Enter The Chat: Because This Wasn’t Complicated Enough

As if the situation needed additional parties, multiple Republican attorneys general have launched a probe into Google and Apple regarding their hosting of TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps on their app stores. The investigation focuses on whether these practices violate state consumer protection laws and federal law.

This creates the perfect regulatory pretzel: Google is simultaneously being investigated for potentially helping Chinese apps reach American consumers AND being forced to sell assets that Chinese companies might want to buy. Apple gets to participate in the fun by being investigated for hosting TikTok while also being one of the few companies with enough cash to potentially buy Google’s ad tech – a purchase that would trigger yet another antitrust investigation.

The circle of regulatory life continues.

What Happens Next: A Cleromancy Guide

As the forced divestiture process for Google’s ad tech unfolds alongside the TikTok saga, several outcomes are possible, each more absurd than the last:

Google successfully argues that its ad tech cannot be separated from its ecosystem, transforming years of antitrust litigation into a technical discussion about API dependencies and database architecture.
The DOJ publishes buyer requirements so specific that only one pre-selected American company qualifies, creating what antitrust experts call a “government-mandated monopoly transfer.”
A Chinese consortium attempts to purchase AdX, triggering an immediate national security review, seventeen congressional hearings, and at least one executive order banning “advertising-related transactions with foreign adversaries.”
Google sells its ad tech to an American company, which immediately outsources all development and operations to China anyway.
The entire process drags on so long that by the time a sale is approved, the technology is obsolete and worth a fraction of its current value.

The most likely outcome, according to sources who spoke on condition that we describe them as “wise beyond their years,” is that Google will propose behavioral remedies instead of divestiture – essentially promising to be nicer to competitors while maintaining ownership of its ad tech. The DOJ will reject this proposal, courts will become involved, and the matter will be resolved sometime around the heat death of the universe.

Meanwhile, TikTok will continue operating under a series of deadline extensions, creating a permanent state of regulatory limbo that satisfies absolutely no one.

The Silicon Valley Takeaway: Build Monopolies, Just Not Too Obviously

For tech executives watching this saga unfold, the lesson is clear: building a monopoly remains extremely profitable, even if you eventually face antitrust action. Google’s ad tech businesses generated a significant portion of its $265 billion in revenue and even if forced to sell these assets, the company will have enjoyed decades of monopoly profits.

The secondary lesson: if you’re going to build a monopoly, be American. As one venture capitalist put it: “The government might eventually force you to sell your monopoly, but at least they’ll let you keep the money. For foreign companies, they’ll just ban you outright.”

And so the great tech regulation paradox continues: monopolies are bad, unless they’re our monopolies. Foreign ownership is dangerous, unless it’s in sectors nobody cares about. And breaking up big tech is essential, unless it creates opportunities for the wrong kind of competition.

Do you think the US government will actually force Google to sell its ad tech? If so, who do you think should be allowed to buy it? Should Chinese companies have the right to bid on US tech assets, or is the TikTok precedent appropriate? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and remember, your opinion definitely isn’t being analyzed by multiple recommendation algorithms right now.

If you enjoyed this revealing look at the hypocrisy of tech regulation, consider supporting TechOnion with a donation. For just 0.000001% of the annual revenue Google generates from its advertising monopoly, you can help us continue explaining why these forced divestitures are both absolutely necessary and hilariously unworkable. Your contribution is tax-deductible in exactly zero jurisdictions.

CEO Replacement Speedrun: Tesla Board Secretly Attempts To Clone 2008 Elon Musk While Current Version Runs D.O.G.E

By

Simba the "Tech King"

-

May 7, 2025

0

In a shocking revelation that Tesla has vigorously denied with the corporate equivalent of “I did not have textual relations with that executive search firm,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Tesla’s board began contacting headhunters to find someone – anyone – who could replace Elon Musk as CEO while the billionaire was busy slashing government jobs faster than Twitter’s (now X) workforce circa 2022.¹ This development comes as T esla’s stock has plummeted 41% from its December peak, and first-quarter automotive revenue dropped 20% compared to last year.²

Board chair Robyn Denholm immediately declared the report “absolutely false,” using Tesla’s official X account – a platform conveniently owned by the very CEO whose replacement she’s allegedly not seeking.³ Meanwhile, Musk himself responded with characteristic restraint by calling the Wall Street Journal “a discredit to journalism,” displaying the same diplomatic finesse that has endeared him to Tesla customers worldwide.

The “We’re Not Looking, But If We Were” List

While Tesla vehemently denies any CEO search, industry insiders have begun speculating about potential candidates who possess the impossible combination of traits needed to replace Musk: manufacturing genius, Twitter (now X) abstinence, and the ability to prevent the company’s price to earnings (P/E) ratio from descending from its stratospheric 167 to a pedestrian single-digit like Ford’s 7.⁴

Names being floated include Tom Zhu (Tesla’s China business leader and master of staying out of the spotlight), JB Straubel (former Tesla CTO who understands both the company and the concept of not alienating customers), and Gwynne Shotwell (SpaceX president and certified Musk-whisperer).⁵ Conspicuously absent from this list is any mention of a “Tim Cook-style” operations expert, perhaps because Tesla fears what happened when Apple’s talented operations guru took over from its volatile founder: merely becoming the most valuable company in world history. How embarrassing.⁶

The Department of CEO Efficiency

As Musk divides his attention between running Tesla and firing government employees through his role at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Tesla’s board members reportedly met with him to suggest – in what must have been the corporate equivalent of a family intervention – that he might want to consider publicly announcing he would spend more time at the company that actually pays his billions of dollars of wages.

In response, Musk grudgingly agreed to reduce his DOGE commitments to “once or twice per week”, a workload that remains significantly more public service than most billionaires perform, unless one counts lobbying for tax breaks. This newfound free time will presumably allow him to focus on Tesla’s core business of selling cars, a novel concept in the automotive industry.

Not Your Father’s Steve Jobs Firing

Analysts desperate for historical parallels have compared this situation to Apple’s ouster of Steve Jobs in 1985. However, there are crucial differences: Steve Jobs was forcibly removed by CEO John Sculley, while Musk reportedly texted a close associate last year that he didn’t want to continue as Tesla CEO but feared nobody else could realize his vision of Tesla as more than just a car company.

Furthermore, unlike Steve Jobs, who returned to save Apple after a series of failed CEOs nearly destroyed it, Musk is irreplaceable because he possesses a unique quality that no executive search firm can replicate: a Twitter (now X) account with 175 million followers and the impulse control of a toddler at a candy store. The Tesla board faces the unenviable task of finding someone who can maintain the company’s astronomical valuation while tweeting 98% less frequently and 100% less controversially.

The Math of Musk: Advanced Stock Price Calculations

Tesla investor Gary Black, managing partner at The Future Fund LLC, offered a precise mathematical formula for the Musk Effect: Musk resigning as CEO but staying in a technical role equals a 5-10% stock drop, while a complete Musk exit equals a 20-25% decline, vaporizing approximately $220 billion in shareholder value.⁷ This valuation model suggests that roughly a quarter of Tesla’s worth exists solely in Musk’s physical presence, making him less a CEO and more a financial horcrux.

Meanwhile, University of Michigan business professor Erik Gordon offered a slightly less quantitative assessment: “I can’t think of anybody on the face of the earth or Mars who can replace Elon Musk” – a statement that inadvertently reveals why the search is so difficult, as Mars remains largely uninhabited and Earth’s population has been thoroughly screened already.

The Impossible Job Description

If Tesla were to post a job listing for Musk’s replacement, it might read something like this:

“Seeking visionary CEO capable of maintaining 100+ P/E ratio while manufacturing cars at competitive prices. Must convince investors company is simultaneously a car manufacturer, tech firm, AI developer, and future robotics leader. Ability to work with eccentric founder who will remain largest shareholder and publicly criticize your decisions is essential. Experience with public backlash and showroom vandalism preferred. Previous success wrestling with alligators while juggling flaming torches a plus.”

The job’s primary qualification-being Elon Musk without being Elon Musk – presents a paradox that no executive search firm can resolve, short of developing cloning technology or locating a multiverse portal.

The Bigfoot Shadow Problem

Any successor would operate under what Professor Gordon calls Musk’s “Bigfoot shadow,” similar to how Apple executives functioned under Jobs’ looming presence. However, unlike Jobs, who was ousted and returned triumphantly, Musk would remain Tesla’s largest shareholder with approximately 13% of the stock, enabling him to tweet criticisms of his replacement from the comfort of whatever underground lair he’s currently developing.

This creates what management consultants call the “backseat driver from hell” scenario, where the founder remains influential enough to torpedo initiatives while bearing none of the responsibility for quarterly earnings calls. Industry experts suggest the only viable candidates might be those with contractual guarantees of massive severance packages and the emotional resilience of a Nokia 3310.

The Tesla-to-BlackBerry Pipeline

Tesla’s succession crisis highlights an existential question: Is Tesla actually the iPhone maker of electric vehicles, or merely the BlackBerry – “a bold innovation that radically changed the sector and created a passionate fanbase, only to see its market share get washed away by competitors”?

While Tesla pioneered the modern electric vehicle market, it no longer holds the same untouchable position. Unlike Apple, which created network effects that locked users into its ecosystem, Tesla has been forced to open its Supercharger network to competitors, and its software offerings are “unlikely to lock in consumers the way iPhone owners are reluctant to move to Android”. Without Musk’s reality distortion field maintaining Tesla’s valuation at 20+ times that of traditional automakers, the company might be forced to compete on mundane metrics like profit margins and build quality.

The Ultimate Meme Stock

Perhaps the most sobering assessment comes from a business writer who described Tesla as “the ultimate meme stock” years ago. While the company doesn’t share the same meme status as GameStop, its stock price heavily depends on retail investors’ faith in Musk to generate market confidence – a skill he has mastered to perfection. Tesla trades at a price-to-earnings ratio exceeding 100 (around 167 last week), compared to General Motors at approximately 6 and Ford at 7.

This suggests that finding a replacement isn’t just about identifying a capable executive, but finding someone who can maintain the quasi-religious fervor Musk has inspired among investors. As one analyst put it, any potential successor would need to “make good on Musk’s vision” rather than chart a new course for the company. In other words, Tesla needs a tribute act, not an original artist.

The Elon Extinction Event

The most uncomfortable truth lurking behind the succession rumors is the reality that Musk will eventually exit the stage one way or another. Whether through retirement, focusing on other ventures, or the inevitable mortality that awaits even those planning Mars colonies, Tesla will someday exist without its founder.

Without a viable succession plan, the company faces what investment analysts call the “founder dependency trap” – a condition where a company’s value is so intertwined with its founder’s persona that separation becomes organizationally traumatic. For Tesla, this means either accepting a dramatic devaluation when Musk departs or finding the corporate equivalent of a face transplant to maintain the illusion that nothing has changed.

As Tesla navigates this crisis while simultaneously denying its existence, the board faces an impossible dilemma: acknowledge the search and trigger a stock collapse, or maintain the charade that Musk will remain CEO forever, defying both time and his own attention span. Perhaps the only viable solution lies not in finding a human replacement at all, but in training one of Tesla’s own AI systems to impersonate Musk on earnings calls while tweeting controversial memes at 3 a.m. – a strategy that would be indistinguishable from the current arrangement to most observers.

Do you think Tesla can survive without Elon Musk? Is the board right to search for a replacement, or should they just accept that the company’s valuation is permanently tied to one man’s Twitter habits? Have you noticed your local Tesla showroom installing reinforced glass due to the backlash against Musk’s political activities? Share your thoughts in the comments below, ideally without triggering another 15% stock price swing.

If you enjoyed this analysis of corporate succession planning and meme-based valuation models, please consider donating to TechOnion. For just 0.0000001% of what Tesla's market cap would drop if Musk leaves, you can help us continue investigating which tech companies are actually just elaborate performance art projects with stock tickers. Remember: your donation helps keep our lights on, unlike Tesla's solar roof division.

References

The Great Scrum Extinction: How AI Is Finally Eliminating the Tech Industry’s Most Beloved Meeting Generators

By

Simba the "Tech King"

-

May 4, 2025

0

Warning: This article may contain traces of truth. Consume at your own risk!

In what tech industry analysts are calling “the most predictable technological disruption since electricity replaced candles,” Instagram influencer and tech commentator Edward Honour has sparked a digital revolt against Scrum Masters with a viral video that essentially suggests using AI to automate away their jobs and “make them disappear.” The video, which has amassed over 12,000 likes and 330 increasingly mutinous comments, represents what anthropologists of corporate culture identify as the final stage of the Agile lifecycle: the violent overthrow of the methodology by the very software engineers it was supposed to liberate.

From Revolutionary Manifesto to Corporate Hostage Situation

To understand how we arrived at this breaking point, we must travel back to 2001, when 17 software engineers gathered at a ski resort in Utah, US and created the Agile Manifesto – a revolutionary document that essentially said, “Maybe we should talk to customers sometimes and not plan software projects like we’re building the Hoover Dam.” These radical ideas – individuals over processes, working software over documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation – spread through the industry like wildfire, promising liberation from the tyranny of Waterfall methodology.

Fast forward to 2025, and what began as a revolutionary movement has completed its transformation into exactly what it sought to destroy. Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum, have calcified into rigid bureaucratic structures that would make Soviet-era administrators weep with pride. Daily standups have become mandatory morning prayers where software engineers confess their software development sins. Sprint planning meetings consume more developer hours than actual development. Retrospectives have devolved into court-mandated therapy sessions where no one speaks their mind for fear of being labeled “not a team player.”

“The average software developer now spends 63% of their time in Agile ceremonies, 22% explaining to the Scrum Master why they’re behind on story points, and maybe 15% actually writing code if they’re lucky,” explains Dr. Isabella Efficiency, author of “Scrum: The Longest Way to Build Software Ever Invented.” “The ‘sprint’ name has become unintentionally ironic – like naming a tortoise ‘Speedy’.”

The Certification Industrial Complex

What truly transformed Agile from liberation movement to corporate hostage situation was the rise of what industry experts call the “Certification Industrial Complex” – a multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to stamping pieces of A4 paper that certify people who’ve never written a line of code as qualified to manage those who do.

The Professional Scrum Master certification, which can be obtained after a two-day workshop and a 60-minute test, has become the tech equivalent of a liberal arts degree – technically a credential but practically a warning sign. There are now over 40 different Agile-related certifications, including the Certified Agile Leadership-Enabled Transformation Enablement Orchestrator (CALETEO), which recipients proudly display on LinkedIn profiles as evidence of their ability to transform simple tasks into day-long workshops.

“The certification ecosystem has created a perfect storm,” notes agile historian Dr. Mark Methodology. “Companies want people with certifications, certification providers want to sell more certifications, and middle managers who don’t understand technology want simple metrics to justify their existence. Nobody involved in this system is incentivized to ask whether any of it actually results in better software.”

The Anti-Pattern Recognition Moment

The viral Instagram video that’s caused such a stir features Honour making a simple but devastating observation: if Agile and Scrum truly valued efficiency and automation, shouldn’t Scrum Masters themselves be automatable? After all, what could be more meta than using AI to automate the role that’s supposed to be improving efficiency?

This observation triggered what psychologists call “anti-pattern recognition” – the sudden, jarring realization that you’ve been participating in a system that contradicts its own principles. Agile, which touts “responding to change over following a plan,” has become a rigid set of ceremonies that must be followed regardless of their value. Scrum, which emphasizes self-organizing teams, has introduced a role specifically to organize the team from the outside.

The signs of this contradiction have been hiding in plain sight for years. According to the HackerNoon article “Scrum Master Anti-Patterns,” many Scrum Masters fall into behaviors like “pursuing flawed metrics” (tracking individual performance metrics to report to managers), “escalating under-performance” (reporting teams that won’t meet sprint commitments to higher levels), and “focusing on team harmony” (prioritizing good feelings over good software).

These behaviors transform the Scrum Master from servant-leader to corporate spy, collecting individual performance data despite Scrum’s emphasis on team accomplishment, and escalating “breaches” to management despite the methodology’s focus on self-organization.

The Non-Technical Hijacking

What makes Honour’s call for automation particularly resonant is his diagnosis of the problem: non-technical people have hijacked Agile methodologies, turning them from practical software development approaches into bureaucratic performance theater.

“The true fatal flaw of Agile wasn’t in the original concept,” explains Dr. Wei Process from the Institute of Methodology Studies. “It was in making it accessible enough that people who’ve never debugged at 2 AM could embrace it. Imagine if heart surgery techniques became so popular that accountants started performing them. That’s essentially what happened to Agile.”

This non-technical colonization explains why the comments on Honour’s video divide neatly into two camps: engineers energetically supporting the automation proposal, and Scrum Masters defending their role while simultaneously demonstrating they don’t understand what automation is.

“I’d love to see an AI try to facilitate a proper retrospective with emotional intelligence,” commented one Certified Scrum Professional, apparently unaware that AI models now write therapy sessions, movie scripts, and political speeches with emotional nuance that would make William Shakespeare weep with inadequacy.

The AI Salvation Fantasy

The darkest irony of the “automate the Scrum Master” movement is how perfectly it exemplifies the tech industry’s reflexive belief that technology can solve human problems – even problems created by previous technological “solutions.”

Honour’s follow-up video doubles down on this techno-solutionism with the advice: “Always try AI first. It’s not the early 2000s. You don’t get style points.” This philosophy – apply AI before considering whether a human approach might be better – epitomizes what sociologists call “the hammer fallacy.” When all you have is AI, everything looks like a task to be automated.

“We’re witnessing the perfect tech industry response to bureaucracy,” notes organizational psychologist Dr. Samantha Structure. “Rather than questioning why we implemented these processes in the first place, we’ll build increasingly complex technologies to automate the unnecessary processes we created. Then, when those technologies create new problems, we’ll build more technologies to solve those. It’s bureaucracy all the way down, just with better marketing.”

The Practical Automation Scenario

What would an automated Scrum Master actually look like? Based on the anti-patterns identified in industry literature, surprisingly implementable:

An AI could easily track story completion, calculate velocity, and generate those burndown charts that product owners glance at for approximately 1.7 seconds before asking why Feature X isn’t done yet. It could schedule and facilitate standups with timers that cut off anyone speaking longer than 60 seconds. It could generate retrospective summaries indistinguishable from the bland “we should communicate better” platitudes that currently cost companies $150,000+ per year.

In fact, the most challenging part of the Scrum Master role to automate might be the coffee ordering for meetings – though even that could likely be handled by a sufficiently sophisticated LLM connected to a corporate Starbucks MCP server.

“The truly terrifying realization isn’t that Scrum Masters could be automated,” whispers one senior engineer at a FAANG company who requested anonymity due to fear of being assigned extra story points. “It’s that in blind tests, most teams might not notice the difference. We’ve already dehumanized the role so much that replacing it with AI would be less ‘Terminator’ and more ‘fixing a typo’.”

The Management Karaoke Effect

The most scathing critique embedded in Honour’s viral call for automation is what it reveals about corporate management’s relationship with methodologies. Much like drunk executives performing karaoke, they know the words but not the music.

“Non-technical managers embraced Agile because it gave them the appearance of modern management without requiring them to actually cede control,” explains corporate anthropologist Dr. Jessica Organization. “They could talk about self-organizing teams while still demanding velocity metrics. They could praise iterative development while still requiring fixed deliverables by fixed dates. They could advocate customer collaboration while still refusing to let customers anywhere near the development process.”

This “Management Karaoke Effect” explains why so many Agile implementations fail despite the methodology’s sound principles. The words are right, but the tune is completely wrong.

In many organizations, Scrum has become what one anonymous software developer described as “waterfall with standup meetings” – all of the rigid planning of traditional project management but with added ceremonies that consume developer time without adding value.

The Circle of Methodological Life

What makes the current backlash particularly fascinating is how predictable it was. Technology methodologies follow a well-documented lifecycle:

First, they emerge as revolutionary grassroots movements opposed to corporate bureaucracy. Next, they gain popularity and become codified into trainings and certifications. Then, corporations adopt them, strip away anything challenging to management authority, and transform them into new bureaucracies. Finally, frustrated practitioners rebel, creating new grassroots methodologies promising liberation from bureaucracy – and the cycle begins anew.

We’ve seen this pattern with Structured Programming, Object-Oriented Programming, Service-Oriented Architecture, DevOps, and now Agile. Each revolution promises freedom from the tyranny of the previous revolution that failed to deliver on its promises.

“The half-life of a software development methodology is approximately 10 years,” notes technology historian Dr. Robert Evolution. “After that, the bureaucratic radiation becomes too toxic, and a new methodology must be born. We’re witnessing the final stages of Agile’s decay and the embryonic formation of whatever will replace it – probably something involving AI, given current trends.”

If Dr. Evolution is correct, we can expect the “AI-Driven Development Manifesto” to emerge sometime in late 2026, promising to free developers from the tyranny of human-led Agile processes.

The Final Retrospective

As we stand at what appears to be the twilight of the Agile era, it’s worth reflecting on what went wrong. The principles themselves remain sound: customer collaboration is valuable, responding to change is necessary, working software matters more than documentation. Where we went astray was in the implementation – turning flexible guidelines into rigid dogma, allowing non-technical managers to co-opt the language while ignoring the spirit, and creating a certification industry that values credentials over competence.

Honour’s call to automate Scrum Masters isn’t really about AI at all – it’s a cry of frustration from the technical heart of the industry, a recognition that something meant to make software development more humane has instead made it more bureaucratic. The enthusiasm for his message isn’t bloodthirstiness against Scrum Masters as individuals; it’s the pent-up rage of software engineers who’ve watched their craft being strangled by processes that were supposed to support it.

Perhaps the most fitting end to the Agile story would be for the software engineers themselves to reclaim it, embracing the original principles while jettisoning the ceremonies, certifications, and corporate modifications that have accumulated like barnacles on a once-sleek ship. Or perhaps it is time for something entirely new – not automated Scrum Masters, but a fundamental rethinking of how humans and technology collaborate to create software.

Either way, one thing is certain: the issue was never really about Scrum. It was about what happens when any methodology becomes more important than its purpose. As one comment on Honour’s video put it: “Agile is dead. Long live agility.”

Have you suffered through particularly pointless Agile ceremonies? Do you have a Scrum Master horror story that would make even the most hardened project manager weep? Or are you a Scrum Master who actually adds value and wants to defend your endangered species? Share your experiences in the comments below, but please keep it under two minutes as our AI timekeeper will cut you off.

Support Real Journalism About Fake Agile

If you've enjoyed this surgical dissection of enterprise-grade methodology dysfunction, consider supporting TechOnion with a donation. Unlike your Scrum Master, we won't make you track your contribution in story points or demand a retrospective about your payment experience. Your support helps us continue creating content that exposes the absurdity of the tech industry while everyone else is busy writing earnest LinkedIn posts about how the Spotify model revolutionized their cat-picture sharing app. We promise to use your contribution efficiently – no daily standups required.

NewsHub

Tim Cook’s Grand Vision: Make Products Thinner Until They Literally Disappear

Apple’s Bold New Pricing Strategy: “What If We Just Charged More?”

The Launch Schedule Shuffle: “It’s Not Confusing If You’re Rich Enough”

The Face ID Vanishing Act: “We Put It Under the Display Because We Can”

The Courage to Follow: Apple’s Bold New Direction of Going Where Others Have Been

The iPad Division’s Existential Crisis: “We’re In Danger, Aren’t We?”

The $700 Million Crease Solution: “It’s Not a Crease, It’s a Feature”

The 20th Anniversary Gift: A Completely Different Philosophy

References

The Charging Position: Technically Called “Dead Bug Mode”

Steve Jobs Would Have Loved It (Or Fired Everyone Involved)

The Secret Origin Story: A Design Choice Born of Necessity (or Laziness)

The Two-Minute Defense: “It Charges Really Fast, Though”

The Cult of Inconvenience: Apple’s Secret Design Philosophy

The 2024 Update: Same Ridiculousness, New Port

The Future of Magic Mouse Design: “It Gets Worse”

The Deeper Meaning: An Existential Crisis Disguised as a Mouse

References

The Lean Government Canvas

Pivoting the Constitution

The Data-Driven Government (Your Data, His Government)

The Conflict of Interest Economy

The Hackathon Governance Model

The Minimum Viable Democracy

The Exit Strategy

The Blockchain Government

The ‘Yes Minister’ Reality

The Real DOGE Revolution

References

Remember When You Actually Made Things for Gamers?

The AI Bubble Bath: Soaking in Hype Until Your Fingers Prune

Geopolitical Fence-Sitting: The US-China AI Split and Your $50 Billion Dilemma

The Open Source Paradox: Shouting “Collaboration” While Locking the Back Door

Your Quantum Mea Culpa: Too Little, Too Late, Too Theoretical

In Conclusion: The Leather Jacket Legacy

References

That Awkward Moment When Your Sugar Daddy Starts Dating Other AI Companies

The Secret AGI Timeline Calculator: Add 5 Years and Multiply by Venture Capital Needs

The “Sorry About Your Job But Have You Considered Learning to Code?” PR Strategy

The Eastern Front: When Your Competition Speaks Mandarin and Charges 95% Less

The Stargate to Nowhere: A $500 Billion Infrastructure Play That’s Definitely Not Desperation

In Conclusion: The Reverse Turing Test

References

The World’s Most Expensive PowerPoint Deck

The $50 Million Minimum Entry Fee: Because Exclusivity Sells

The Murati Magic: Turning Nothing into Billions

The Future Promises Machine

The Customization Revolution: One Size Fits All, But Make It Personal

The Ethics Arbitrage: Open Science, Closed Wallet

The $10 Billion Question: What Makes This Worth $10 Billion?

The Thinking Machines Lab Paradox: The Less Specific, The More Valuable

The AI Arms Race: Minimum Viable Hype

Conclusion: The Emperor’s New Neural Network

References

We Asked The AI For Consent And It Said Yes

The Exceptional Talent of Digital Gaslighting

Just A Little Harmless Mass Manipulation

The Reddit Legal Retribution Tour

The Future of Synthetic Manipulation

The r/changemyview Moderator Support Group

Operation Break-Up Google (But Only To US Companies On Our Christmas Card List)

The TikTok Paradox: National Security Edition

The Reverse Gold Rush: Chinese Companies Already Eyeing Ad Tech

The Great Google Ad Tech Auction (Terms And Conditions Apply)

Trump’s Tariff Tangle: How 54% Changed Everything

The Unasked Question: Does Anybody Actually Want This Stuff?

State AGs Enter The Chat: Because This Wasn’t Complicated Enough

What Happens Next: A Cleromancy Guide

The Silicon Valley Takeaway: Build Monopolies, Just Not Too Obviously

The “We’re Not Looking, But If We Were” List

The Department of CEO Efficiency

Not Your Father’s Steve Jobs Firing

The Math of Musk: Advanced Stock Price Calculations

The Impossible Job Description

The Bigfoot Shadow Problem

The Tesla-to-BlackBerry Pipeline

The Ultimate Meme Stock

The Elon Extinction Event

References