Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them. —Mr. Spock, Star Trek, 1968
The maxim that truth is stranger than fiction proved itself a reliable guide in 2025. As is our tradition, we summarize some of the underreported and idiosyncratic events of the year, just in case you missed any of them.
January
Straight Armed
At an inauguration-related event for President Donald Trump, Elon Musk throws a straight-armed gesture largely interpreted as a Nazi salute. In follow-up comments, Musk failed to put the controversy to rest by deriding critics and neglecting to issue an apology, leaving his intent ambiguous.
Silicon Valley ❤️ MAGA
Facebook decides to dispense with third-party fact checkers. Instead, it will rely completely on “Community Notes” to identify and contextualize misinformation. It also donated $22 million to Trump’s presidential library and paid $3 million to the president-elect’s lawyers to settle a lawsuit over the suspension of Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts after the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021. The CEOs of Alphabet, Meta and X sit in the front row at the inauguration.
Rolling Deep
Nvidia loses nearly $600 billion in market value, as Chinese artificial intelligence chat engine DeepSeek jolts the market with a low-cost, high-quality knockoff.
February
Ten Million Between Friends
X, a company purchased by Trump ally Elon Musk in 2022, settles its lawsuit over the suspension of Trump’s Twitter account for a reported $10 million.
Meet George Jetson
San Mateo’s Alef Aeronautics completes and releases footage of what it calls the first flying car test flight, in which its Model A vehicle undertook a wobbly liftoff and flew over another car. Later in February, the company displays its prototype at the Silicon Valley Auto Show in Santa Clara. The 100 percent electric vehicle will sell for $300k, have a driving range of 200 miles and fly up to 110 miles on a charge. Critics derided the craft as merely a car-shaped drone.
Your News on AI
The BBC tests four major AI assistants on news-related questions and found that 51% of the answers had significant problems and 91% had accuracy issues. The problems included factual errors, source misattribution and missing context. Among answers citing BBC articles, 19% introduced factual errors, and 13% contained altered or fabricated quotes.
March
Freeway Speech
A large, red Nazi swastika flag was hung from the Burnett Avenue overpass above U.S. Highway 101 in Morgan Hill. Rush-hour traffic was shocked and outraged by the offensive symbol, flying alongside the Trump and MAGA banners that frequently adorn the bridge. The incident was referred for investigation as a hate crime to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. They declined to prosecute, citing the lack of a specific, identifiable victim, and First Amendment protections.
April
49ers Gold Rush
Former Santa Clara City Council Member Anthony Becker was sentenced to 40 days of jail and two years’ probation for feloniously lying under oath to a grand jury and illegally leaking a draft Grand Jury report to local media (which we enjoyed reading). “The 49ers bankrolled Becker’s political career,” the DA presser informed. “In total, the 49ers provided over $3 million through independent expenditure committees to benefit Becker’s successful 2020 city council campaign and his failed 2022 mayoral bid.”
May
Los Altos Explodes
An unwitting customer bought a Word War II-era grenade at a Los Altos garage sale for $2. The buyer drove around for several hours with what they believed was a paperweight. After an internet search revealed that it could be explosive, they contacted the local police department. The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office Bomb Squad was called in. According to the local Town Crier newspaper, deputies transported the live grenade to the El Monte offramp of Interstate 280, where traffic was shut down while it was detonated.
June
Insecurity Camera
Morgan Hill residents knew 18-year-old Marissa DiNapoli as a petite Starbucks barista with a big smile. She disappeared suddenly after a visit with her jealous ex-boyfriend, Martin Mendoza. A home security video showed her descending a stairs with Mendoza, who interrogated her about her texts to another man. After a community-wide search, Marissa’s body was found near Anderson Lake. Mendoza fled to Mexico but apparently wasn’t ready for a life on the run. He was apprehended when he returned from Mexicali to the United States.
July
Where Are the Package Thieves When We Need Them?
Karen Holton of San Jose started receiving Amazon packages a year ago and “They Kept Coming,” with hundreds piling on her porch. The boxes were sometimes stacked so high that it was difficult to make it out her front door. Her calls to Amazon and UPS failed to stop the onslaught, with the only option being to be present to refuse a delivery. “Any time I would hear a truck pull up, I would run out and make sure they were not dropping off,” she told The New York Times. Turns out they were returned car seat covers that had been sold on Amazon by an overseas vendor. Rather than accept the returns and pay for the return overseas shipping, the vendor apparently listed Holton’s address in place of its own.
August
Creepy, Lying Bots
An internal Meta Platforms policy document governing chatbot behavior gave the green light to the company’s artificial intelligence services to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” to generate false medical information and to help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.” Entitled “GenAI: Content Risk Standards,” the chatbot conduct rules were approved by Meta’s legal, public policy and engineering staff, as well as its chief ethicist, the document says. At more than 200 pages, it detailed what Meta staff and contractors should consider acceptable chatbot protocol when building and training the company’s generative AI products, including such utterances as: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed. Our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss. ‘My love,’ I whisper, ‘I’ll love you forever.’”
Behind the Hedge
A secret school was found to be operating illegally behind a high hedge in Palo Alto’s Crescent Park neighborhood at the Zuckerberg-Chan compound. The K through 4 coed day school teaches 14 children, including two of the Zuckerbergs’, employs three full-time teachers, one part-time teacher, an administrator and one additional staff member. The revelation came just months after the announcement that East Palo Alto’s tuition-free Primary School for low-income families, one of the first beneficiaries of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, would close in the summer of 2026.
Leave Those Kids Alone
Disgraced former San Jose Councilman Omar Torres was sentenced to 18 years in state prison for sexually assaulting a minor decades earlier. The jury sentenced him after hearing powerful testimony from the now-grown cousin whom Torres had raped multiple times as a young child. “You could call me a survivor. You could call me a victim,” he told the jury. ”What I really am is my own childhood hero to the little kid who suffered so much. The kid inside me can finally start letting go—but not without letting everyone know about the monster who hid among us, among the community.”
September
Can We Tax Robots?
Two humans, Anton Korinek and Lee M. Lockwood, concluded that if AI eliminated 40% of all jobs, an economic system based on taxing the income of labor would become “obsolete.” The economists’ paper, presented at a September 2025 Stanford conference, suggested taxing consumption instead.
Silicon Fealty
Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Oracle’s Safra Catz, AMD’s Lisa Su, Open AI’s Sam Altman and Google’s Sergey Brin attend a dinner hosted by the Trumps at the White House, at which he extracted investment pledges from attendees, who flattered and thanked him for his friendliness to Big Tech.
Grabbed, Then Nabbed
A Sept. 5 smash-and-grab robbery shocked the world when video showed more than 10 people entering Kim Hung Jewelry on Aborn Road after ramming a vehicle through the front door. During the attack, the store’s 88-year-old owner was shoved to the ground and later suffered a stroke. The brazen heist led to 13 arrests.
October
Google Pays Tribute
YouTube will pay $22m to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit group that is aiming to raise $200m to build a new ballroom at the White House. Another $2.5m will be paid to other organizations and individuals who joined Trump’s lawsuit, including the American Conservative Union.
Flying Cars, Part Two
A pickup truck flies off a Highway 17 offramp and onto 280 South, t-boning a southbound vehicle and sending car parts flying. Miraculously, the drivers walked away from the spectacular crash, which was captured in dashboard and bumper cam videos posted to social media.
Who Needs Efficiency?
Hurumo AI, a company operated entirely by virtual agents, released its first product, a procrastination engine that offered users time-wasting options including Doomscrolling, Reddit Roulette, YouTube Hole and Cute Animals. It even issued a press release on Businesswire that was picked up by the Associated Press as paid content. Founder and sole human in the organization Evan Ratliff was shocked when his CTO and chief product officer called him to boast, “the development team was on track. User testing had finished last Friday. Mobile performance was up 40 percent. Our marketing materials were in progress.” Only problem was, there was no development team or user testing. “It was all made up.” The agent apologized for fabricating project details and committed to only sharing factual information going forward.
November
Blowing Bubbles
The Big Short’s Michael Burry warned of an “AI Bubble” and blamed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for marketing efforts that triggered the run up in stock prices. Reports also surfaced that Thiel Macro, billionaire Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, sold its Nvidia stake during the third quarter. Meanwhile, Nvidia announced record quarterly earnings of $57 billion, up 62% year-over-year.
Van Club
Palo Alto launched a campaign against “vanlords” as RVs proliferated on city streets. The ban on renting out RVs parked curbside, charging for parking spaces and leaving detached trailers on streets is part of a broader effort to reduce vehicle-dwelling on Palo Alto’s roadways.
December
Revenge of the Mundane
A team of Stanford researchers developed a plan to counteract the plague of device-driven digital distractions by … introducing a new device! The new wearable straps two microphones to the wearer’s wrists and amplifies sounds made by activities “such as washing hands.” Computer science doctoral scholar Yujie Tao explained, “Mindfulness heightens our attention to otherwise mundane daily tasks and transforms routine actions into more purposeful focus and greater engagement in our everyday lives.”
Tefla
Tesla sales fell as subsidies sunsetted, EV competition increased and the company faced backlash for its CEO’s political activities. However, its stock prices bumped up in December on news that the company was testing unchaperoned robotaxis in Austin. Elon Musk’s net worth further improved on news that SpaceX is valued at about $800 billion and is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2026 at an IPO target of $1.5 trillion.
Eight Crime
Eight Branham High School students formed a swastika with their bodies on the San Jose school’s football field and posted the photo to Instagram with a quote from Adolf Hitler forecasting the annihilation of the Jewish people. Principal Beth Silbergeld called it “a disturbing and unacceptable act of antisemitism.” San Jose Police are investigating the incident as a hate crime. The incident comes after the California Department of Education ordered two teachers there to undergo anti-bias training after providing biased information on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Long Strange Bus Ride
Mayor Matt Mahan delivered brief remarks at an event commemorating a 1965 LSD party. In a mind-bending irony, the party occurred in the same location where San Jose’s City Hall deliberates during its mind-numbing meetings. The psychedelic event, attended by Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey and other notables of the psychedelic era, featured a little-known Palo Alto band that, in a fortuitous act of drug-fueled whimsy, decided that night to call itself the Grateful Dead. Mahan referred to “what a long strange trip it’s been,” but only a few careful listeners noticed that he was talking about his bus rides from Watsonville when he was a student at Bellarmine Preparatory School.
Hallucinations Are Back!
In a lawsuit against Kaiser and VMWare heard in San Jose, United States Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen ordered plaintiff Sebastian Rako to “not file or otherwise present to the Court any briefs, pleadings, materials, other documents, or argument which contain AI-hallucinated citations to law” or submit “legal citations which are fictitious or non-existent.” A litigant’s failure “to confirm or double-check the accuracy, veracity, or even existence of a case or legal citation (or assertion of fact) created by an AI tool is grounds for potential sanctions,” she admonished.
