Students Excited About Their Guillotine, Billionaire Loses Head
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CALIFORNIA, November 12, 2025 (ABF Newswire) - "It worked!" shouted Russ Cromwell, when the blade fell and cleanly severed the head of the billionaire. "I think we'll try a trebuchet next," a confident and elated Steven Walton said while high-fiving the small group of onlookers. "The 'A Trebuchet, You Say' festival is held in Nevada. That might be fun."
The functional guillotine replica was built by Stanford engineering majors Russ Cromwell and Steven Walton for the "Marie Antoinette" play held by the school's theater department. They planned to test the device on a couple of watermelons and a pig's corpse for the grand finale. A group of about 20 students and faculty came for the display.
The billionaire, a tech investor from a prominent startup incubator, was on campus to pitch his firm's "Drop College, Come Startup with Us" message to an auditorium of first year computer science majors. He came to see the guillotine after his security detail mentioned they overheard some students talking about its trial run in a field close by.
Police were called to the scene and, after interviewing the witnesses including the deceased's security detail, have ruled the death an accidental death by guillotine.
"This is great timing," mused Nancy Schloss, a theater major who helps manage props for the play. "Once cleaned, that blood might leave a nice patina of authenticity on the guillotine in time for the performance."
The deceased had recently launched a super PAC that ran ads on television and social media explaining to California workers that unions were actually the ones making their lives harder. The ads featured regular-looking people in t-shirts and jeans nodding along to the message that collective bargaining just meant paying dues to corrupt bosses. None of the ads mentioned that the deceased's own portfolio companies — a handful of app-based delivery and ride-hailing startups — had spent years fighting California's Proposition 22, which would have required them to classify their drivers and couriers as employees entitled to benefits and minimum wage protections, rather than independent contractors who could be switched off by an algorithm at any time. The super PAC had so far spent $11 million helping elect two California state legislators who subsequently killed a bill that would have closed that loophole.