Chong Ming Lee, Junior News Reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau.

Trump says he’s declassifying files about aliens and UFOs. That’s going to make some longtime betters on Polymarket very rich.

President Donald Trump says he is directing federal agencies to declassify UFO files. For traders betting on aliens, that could mean a very earthly payday.

“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Thursday night.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump took aim at former President Barack Obama, accusing him of improperly discussing classified material when speaking about extraterrestrial life on a recent podcast.

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that Obama “gave classified information” and wasn’t “supposed to be doing that,” adding that he could get him “out of trouble” by declassifying the relevant files.

Obama said in a tongue-in-cheek exchange with podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen last week that aliens are “real” and that they’re not “being kept” at Area 51. He later clarified in an Instagram post that there was no evidence during his presidency that aliens “have made contact with us.”

Aliens have always had a niche following. In prediction markets, aliens are tradable assets.

On the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket, guessing about aliens has become a high-volume betting category. Traders have poured millions of dollars into whether the US will confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life.

One of the platform’s largest markets asks whether the US will confirm that aliens exist before 2027. The market has drawn more than $4 million in trading volume as of Thursday.

Betting activity has also centered on whether a Trump administration would declassify UFO files before 2027, with odds climbing above 80% in December.

Polymarket users also placed bets on other extraterrestrial theories, including whether mysterious drones spotted over New Jersey were aliens.

If the files are released and contain anything definitive, longtime alien bettors may finally cash in.

Notable speculation about aliens and UFOs

In November 2024, unidentified drones were seen flying at night over New Jersey and other East Coast states.

The mysterious sightings unsettled residents and drew questions from local officials, fueling a wave of speculation about what — or who — was in the sky. Alien theories quickly gained traction.

At that time, Trump said the government “knows what is happening” but wasn’t sharing it.

“For some reason, they don’t want to comment. I think they’d be better off saying what it is. Our military knows, and our president knows, and for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense,” he said at Mar-a-Lago.

“Something strange is going on,” he added.

A Facebook group titled “New Jersey Mystery Drones — let’s solve it” has grown to more than 81,000 members as of writing. Users in the group continue to float the possibility of extraterrestrial involvement, alongside speculation about commercial or military craft.




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Amanda Goh

The newest villain in ‘Toy Story’ isn’t a toy — it’s screen time

When “Toy Story” premiered in 1995, the enemy was plastic. In its latest chapter, it’s pixels.

More than 30 years after Woody worried about being replaced by Buzz Lightyear, the franchise is ready to take on a bigger threat: the screen.

The official trailer for “Toy Story 5” was released on Thursday and shows the toys vying for Bonnie’s attention against a frog-themed tablet named Lilypad. Bonnie is the young girl to whom Andy gave his toys when he left for college at the end of “Toy Story 3.”

In the clip, Bonnie receives the device in a package and is almost instantly absorbed, scrolling and tapping with a glazed look as her analog toys watch from the sidelines.

It all builds to a face-off between Jessie the cowgirl doll and Lilypad. Jessie says, “You’re not even listening to me,” only for the tablet to coolly reply, “I’m always listening.”

Jessie, voiced by Joan Cusack, has been in charge since Woody left at the end of “Toy Story 4.” Now, as Bonnie’s attention drifts elsewhere, the gang brings their old — and now balding — leader back.

“I don’t know, Jessie,” Woody says in the trailer. “Toys are for play, but tech is for everything.”

The film is set to be released on June 19, with Tom Hanks and Tim Allen returning to voice Woody and Buzz, respectively.

The storyline taps into a broader debate playing out in real life, as parents and experts wrestle with how screens are reshaping childhood.

Too much screentime has been linked to delays in social skills development, as well as problems with attention and behavior. Those concerns have prompted some governments to move toward banning social media use for children under 16.

The last installment in the Pixar franchise, “Toy Story 4,” was released in 2019. It surpassed $1 billion at the global box office and won an Oscar for best animated feature.




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DeepMind’s CEO says using AI can make you a genius — or hurt your critical thinking skills

It’s up to you whether AI makes you sharper or slowly dulls your brain, says Demis Hassabis.

In a Thursday interview with entrepreneur Varun Mayya on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit, the Google DeepMind CEO said that AI is just like the internet. People can use it to learn all kinds of topics, or use it in ways that “degrade” their thinking.

“With AI, if you use it in a lazy way, it will make you worse at critical thinking and so on,” he said. “But that’s down to you as the individual. No one can help you do that.”

He added that people need to be smart and use these technologies in ways that enhance their thinking rather than dull it.

Hassabis cofounded DeepMind in 2010, which Google acquired in 2014. It merged with Google Brain in 2023 to form Google DeepMind, the lab behind tools such as Gemini and Nano Banana. The CEO and a DeepMind coworker, John Jumper, were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work on protein structure prediction.

As AI gets incorporated into daily life, debates about its risks and rewards have intensified, with several tech leaders warning about the dangers of an overreliance on AI tools.

Earlier this week, tech billionaire Mark Cuban said that there are two types of people who use AI.

“There are generally 2 types of LLM users, those that use it to learn everything, and those that use it so they don’t have to learn anything,” Cuban said of large language models in an X post on Tuesday.

Cuban has previously said that AI models can’t provide all the answers and are “stupid” but like “a savant that remembers everything.”

At a June conference, the CEO of French AI lab Mistral said that a risk of using AI for everything is that humans will stop trying.

“The biggest risk with AI is not that it will outsmart us or become uncontrollable, but that it will make us too comfortable, too dependent, and ultimately too lazy to think or act for ourselves,” Arthur Mensch said.




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Tesla is dropping a bargain version of the Cybertruck

Elon Musk’s Tesla is doubling down on its road map to make the Cybertruck less vanity, more working man, with a budget version that’s clocking in a little closer to the competition, price-wise.

In an X post on Thursday night, Tesla announced it will roll out its “most affordable Cybertruck yet.” It’s advertised, per the post, as “tough as nails with ultra-low cost of ownership” starting at $59,990.

The cheapest all-wheel-drive Cybertruck sold for just under $100,000 in 2024. It’s now listed starting at $79,990.

While Musk has often positioned the Cybertruck as a competitor to the Ford F-150, at close to $60,000, the Cybertruck is still a premium option. The F-150 starts at $39,330.

The cheaper Cybertruck comes amid Tesla’s race to reposition Musk’s shiny, silver vehicle as an everyman’s car.

The new version of the Cybertruck is now listed in a Tesla comparison chart as the company’s “most affordable” Cybertruck. It has a lower towing capacity of 7,500 pounds, down from the 11,000 pounds listed for its “Premium All-Wheel Drive” and “Cyberbeast” versions.

Significant interior differences include heated seats only in the first row, compared to both rows for the premium versions. The cheaper Cybertruck comes with textile seats, unlike the “premium interiors” in more expensive iterations.

Musk once touted the truck as “apocalypse-proof.” It’s been subjected to recalls, including over its rearview camera, windshield wiper, and reports of jammed accelerator pedals.

The more affordable Cybertruck comes after a year of modest sales for Tesla’s electric truck.

Tesla sold 20,237 Cybertrucks in the US in 2025, according to data from Cox Automotive released in January — half of its 2024 sales figures. It also falls far short of Musk’s 2023 projection that the Cybertruck would sell 250,000 units a year.




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Mark Cuban says there are 2 types of people who use AI: the learners and the lazy

  • Mark Cuban says there are two types of LLM users: learners and non-learners.
  • Cuban has previously said companies need to embrace AI, but that it’s not perfect.
  • Some proponents of AI have said that one risk of the technology is that it could make people lazy.

Mark Cuban says there are two types of people who use AI. Which one are you?

“There are generally 2 types of LLM users, those that use it to learn everything , and those that use it so they don’t have to learn anything,” Cuban said of large language models in an X post on Tuesday.

The “Shark Tank” billionaire has been bullish about AI and said that companies need to embrace it.

Cuban has said there will be “two types of companies: those who are great at AI, and everybody else,” Business Insider’s James Faris previously reported. He’s also said that AI models can’t provide all the answers and are “stupid” but like “a savant that remembers everything.”

Bill Gurley, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm Benchmark, agrees “100%” with Cuban that there are two types of AI users.

“If you are on a custom career path where you aim to differentiate yourself, AI is ‘jet fuel’ – you can learn and soar faster than ever before,” Gurley said on X in response to Cuban.

Or, it could have the opposite effect.

Even some of AI’s biggest proponents have warned that the technology could make people lazy.

Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI, said last year that the biggest risk to humans posed by AI was “deskilling” and employees becoming lazier as they rely too heavily on the AI tools.

“You want people to continue learning,” he said in an interview with The Times of London. “Being able to synthesize information and criticize information is a core component to learning.”

Business Insider reached out to Cuban for additional comment.




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Pranav Dixit

Meta’s metaverse is going mobile — and leaving VR behind

Meta is dialing back the metaverse to mean something far less futuristic: an app on your phone.

The company, which spent billions of dollars to build Horizon Worlds — an immersive, virtual hangout zone on its Quest virtual reality headsets — is “shifting focus” for Horizon Worlds “to be almost exclusively mobile,” according to a blog post published on Thursday.

Horizon Worlds is part of Meta’s Reality Labs division for VR products and smart glasses, a unit that has burned nearly $80 billion since 2020.

“Last year, we began to experiment with Worlds as a mobile platform, and we saw positive momentum,” wrote Samantha Ryan, Meta’s vice president of content at Reality Labs. “Now, to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.”

The move signals how dramatically Meta has redrawn its VR ambitions.

Last month, Meta laid off roughly 10% of Reality Labs employees, closed three VR gaming studios it owned, and stopped releasing new content for Supernatural, a popular VR fitness app it acquired in 2023.

Meta said it is still committed to virtual reality hardware and supporting third-party developers who create games for it.

“We’re in it for the long haul,” Ryan wrote, and pointed to the company’s “robust roadmap of future VR headsets tailored to different audience segments.”

Meta invested nearly $150 million in VR developer platforms in 2025, Ryan wrote, and she said that popular games like “The Thrill of the Fight 2,” “Hard Bullet,” and “UG” had earned “millions” in revenue.

Still, she wrote that 86% of the time people spend in Meta’s headsets is in third-party apps, not its own. The pivot to mobile effectively pits Horizon Worlds against entrenched competitors like Roblox and Fortnite that cater to casual mobile gamers rather than VR enthusiasts with headsets.

On Meta’s latest earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg pitched Horizon as the natural home for “immersive 3D” content: AI-generated scenes, objects, and mini experiences. Now, rather than putting on a headset, people could just spin up that content with a prompt and then share it straight into Instagram, Facebook, or Threads, he said.

Have a tip? Contact Pranav Dixit via email at pranavdixit@protonmail.com or Signal at 1-408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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A timeline of former Prince Andrew’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, from the Virginia Giuffre lawsuit to his 2026 arrest

On Thursday, Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. It was his 66th birthday.

The former prince served as UK trade envoy from 2001 to 2011, and the Epstein files appear to show Mountbatten-Windsor forwarding emails with his official work reports to the disgraced financier in 2010 and 2011.

“Following a thorough assessment, we have now opened an investigation into this allegation of misconduct in public office,” Oliver Wright, the assistant chief constable with the Thames Valley Police, said. “It is important that we protect the integrity and objectivity of our investigation as we work with our partners to investigate this alleged offence.”

King Charles released a statement about the arrest on Thursday.

“I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and suspicion of misconduct in public office,” it said. “What now follows is the full, fair, and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities. In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation.”

“Let me state clearly: the law must take its course,” the king’s statement went on to say. “As this process continues, it would not be right for me to comment further on this matter. Meanwhile, my family and I will continue in our duty and service to you all.”

Police were photographed at Sandringham estate in Norfolk, where Mountbatten-Windsor had been living, as well as his previous residence in Berkshire, on Thursday, carrying out searches of the properties.

The police released Mountbatten-Windsor “under investigation” around 11 hours after his arrest, AP reported. He was photographed leaving the Aylsham Police Station in a car.




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The biggest scandals of the British royal family

The two-hour primetime special was full of stunning revelations.

Markle told Winfrey that Kate Middleton made her cry the week of her wedding over a flower girl dress and not the other way around, as had been reported in tabloids. She also said members of the royal family had “concerns and conversations” about how dark Archie’s skin would be before he was born, and The Firm told them that Archie wouldn’t receive a title or security, breaking from protocol.

She also opened up about having suicidal thoughts amid constant tabloid criticism and racism, and said a senior member of the royal institution wouldn’t let her seek help.

Harry revealed that his family cut him off financially in the first quarter of 2020, and that Charles stopped taking his phone calls before they announced they were stepping back from the royal family. He also said that it hurts that the royal family never acknowledged tabloids’ racist treatment of Markle, and that none of the royal family members have reached out to apologize for the reasons he felt he had to leave.

Following the interview, Buckingham Palace released a statement on behalf of the Queen.

“The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan,” the statement read.

“The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. Whilst some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. 

“Harry, Meghan, and Archie will always be much loved family members.”




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Police arrested a man at a meeting to discuss a proposed Oklahoma data center after exceeding his time limit by 30 seconds

Applause broke out during an Oklahoma man’s speech at a city council meeting on Tuesday to discuss a proposed data center. A minute later, shouts of disbelief rang out across the room.

“Disgusting!” one woman shouted as Claremore Police Department officers handcuffed and escorted Daniel Blanchard out of the room.

Authorities said they arrested Blanchard, whose speech exceeded the three-minute time limit, for trespassing.

Over 100 people, including Blanchard, had gathered in a ballroom at Rogers State University in Claremore to voice their opinions about the large data center project. The developer, Beale Infrastructure, is proposing a campus in the Claremore Industrial Park that includes data centers, supporting infrastructure, and office space.

Blanchard was among the residents who opted to speak during the public comment portion, which limits each person to three minutes. In his speech, Blanchard spoke about what he considered compliance issues related to the potential data centers.

“The Claremore Industrial Economic Development Authority has a fiduciary responsibility to the public, not to build infrastructure. And this act of overreach is putting the health and safety of members of this community at risk,” he said.

AI is driving a data center construction boom across the United States. While companies like OpenAI argue that building new data centers will reindustrialize the US economy and create jobs, residents of towns where developers are proposing new data centers worry about their impact on power grids, water resources, pollution, and overall quality of life.

In an investigation published in September, Business Insider reported that over 1,200 data centers had already been built or were approved for construction across the country.

The proposed data center in Claremore, a suburban hub of Tulsa home to about 20,000 people, has divided the town. During the three-hour meeting on Tuesday evening, dozens of residents spoke both in favor and against the project.

Blanchard exceeded his three minutes by about 30 seconds before police officers approached him. He gathered his notes and calmly followed the officers to the front of the hall, where town officials were sitting.

In a video of the meeting posted by the town on its YouTube channel, Blanchard appears to hand his notes to a council member. At that point, police arrested Blanchard, placing him in handcuffs. The crowd hollered in shock.

In a statement, the Claremore Police Department said officers aren’t responsible for enforcing city council rules and only become involved in city council meetings when an official orders them to remove an individual.

“The man’s position on the issues, what he said, or his unwillingness to follow rules of the meeting played no part in the officer’s decision to arrest him,” the statement said. “He was arrested for trespassing in compliance with the law and with the hope of restoring order to an important meeting.”

A local politician fighting the data center project posted to X on Wednesday that Blanchard has been released from jail. The next council meeting is scheduled for March 2.




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Celebrity deaths 2026: Remembering the famous people we lost this year

The Rev. Jesse Jackson was a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, a minister, and an activist icon who twice ran for president.

Born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson experienced Jim Crow segregation on public buses and at school firsthand. It would shape the rest of his life.

His fight for civil rights began in the 1960s, when he helped organize protests and demonstrations across the US and worked closely alongside civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

His decadeslong career as a leading civil rights activist included support for modern national movements, such as the push for voting rights, the fight against racism, and a higher minimum wage.

Jackson ran for president twice, both times as a democrat. He placed third for the party’s nomination in 1984 and second in 1988. This marked the most successful presidential runs of any Black candidate prior to Barack Obama.

Jackson announced in 2017 that he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In November 2025, Jackson was treated in a Chicago hospital after complications from progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare neurodegenerative condition.

Jackson died on February 17.




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