We like to think there’s a lesson in every technological misadventure. But when technology becomes dependent on power, sometimes the takeaway is simpler: it would have been better to stay away.
That was a conclusion Elon Musk drew from his sojourn as instigator of DOGE, the insurgent cost-cutting initiative that took a chainsaw to federal agencies. The public protested. Teslas were set alight, and drivers of his hyped Cybertruck discovered that instead of a thumbs-up, they were getting the middle finger.
On reflection, Musk said he wouldn’t do it again. “Instead of doing DOGE, I would have, basically … worked on my companies,” he told an interviewer this month. “And they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.”
Regrets—2025 had a few. Here are some of the more notable ones.
NEO, the home robot
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Imagine a metal butler that fills your dishwasher and opens the door. It’s a dream straight out of science fiction. And it’s going to remain there—at least for a while.
That was the hilarious, and deflating, takeaway from the first reviews of NEO, a 66-pound humanoid robot whose maker claims it will “handle any of your chores reliably” when it ships next year.
But as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal learned, NEO took two minutes to fold a sweater and couldn’t crack a walnut. Not only that, but the robot was teleoperated the entire time by a person wearing a VR visor.
