Elon Musk receives a golden key from Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington DC on 30 May 2025. Elon Musk receives a golden key from Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington DC on 30 May 2025. I myself have a cold. Today, we are looking back at the biggest stories in tech of 2025 - Elon Musk's political rise, burst, and fall; artificial intelligence's subsumption of the global economy, all other technology, and even the Earth's topography; Australia's remarkable social media ban; the tech industry's new Trumpian politics; and, as a treat, a glimpse of the apocalypse offered by one of Silicon Valley's savviest and strangest billionaires. Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends a memorial service for slain far-right commentator Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium, in Glendale, Arizona, on 21 September 2025.

I've been pondering screen-time and isolation after I suffered through a recent bout of Covid. Even a few days of seclusion coupled with lengthy, uninterrupted spates of staring at screens were enough to return me to the state of mind in which I spent most of 2020. I hope all of you reading have a wonderful winter and new year, filled with the opposite of that experience: family, friends, and cheery, in-person parties. Today in Techscape: We look back at the biggest tech story of 2024, Elon Musk, and at the Amazon workers strike in the US. The biggest tech story of the year is Elon Musk's rise to omnipresence and an unprecedented level of global power.

What do you do when the tech world mostly grinds to a halt at the end of December? You reheat your hot takes, force a narrative thread on a company's ups and downs and edit it all up for consumption. Yes, it's a little quiet at the end of the year (barring Apple Watch bans), but that won't stop TMA from finding something for me to talk to himself about. We're looking at a few of the major stories from the last 12 months and .. some other things where I just has to say my piece. And if not on a short YouTube video that's clipped, cropped and pushed into socials, then where?

We have made it – almost – through another year without being churned into paste by a super-intelligent AI, conscripted into a Martian work camp by an insane billionaire or forced offline by a Carrington event. Even in the absence of civilisation-altering events it's been a busy year. But the advantage of a slow week (I hope that isn't tempting fate) is that you can reflect on the past 12 months and realise that, sometimes, there's only a few stories that really matter. The Guardian has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack in December and that the personal data of UK staff members has been accessed in the incident. "We believe this was a criminal ransomware attack, and not the specific targeting of the Guardian as a media organisation," said Guardian Media Group's chief executive, Anna Bateson and the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.

In this excerpt from a #TalkingTech Live broadcast, the panelists weigh in on Uber's bad week, and what's next in ride hailing. LOS ANGELES -- This week's tech news was dominated by charges of sexual harassment and discrimination at ride-hailing service Uber, a potential push from Google to bring ride-sharing to the mass market and a move from Facebook to bring more ads to the social network. But Uber owned the most headlines, which started on Sunday with a blog from a former female engineer who described how the company's human resources department repeatedly deflected her and other women's reports of sexual harassment from their colleagues, even telling her that she could expect a negative performance review if she stayed on her alleged harasser's team. The blog post was seen as a wake-up call for Silicon Valley, where six out of 10 women say they've experienced unwanted sexual advances, according to a survey released last year. Still, many pointed out that the male-dominated tech industry has had several such "wake-up calls" -- to little avail.