Business
Boeing is cutting 10 percent of its workforce
Team,
Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together. Beyond navigating our current environment, restoring our company requires tough decisions and we will have to make structural changes to ensure we can stay competitive and deliver for our customers over the long term.
We need to be clear-eyed about the work we face and realistic about the time it will take to achieve key milestones on the path to recovery. We also need to focus our resources on performing and innovating in the areas that are core to who we are, rather than spreading ourselves across too many efforts that can often result in underperformance and underinvestment.
With that in mind, today I am sharing some difficult decisions and several program updates:
On the 777X program, the challenges we have faced in development, as well as from the flight test pause and ongoing work stoppage, will delay our program timeline. We have notified customers that we now expect first delivery in 2026.
We plan to build and deliver the remaining 767 Freighters ordered by our customers and then conclude production of the commercial program in 2027. Production for the KC-46A Tanker will continue.
In BDS, our performance on fixed-price development programs is simply not where it needs to be. We expect substantial new losses in BDS this quarter, driven by the work stoppage on commercial derivatives, continued program challenges and our decision to complete production on the 767 freighter. I will be providing additional oversight of this business and these programs.
Along with the above actions, we must also reset our workforce levels to align with our financial reality and to a more focused set of priorities. Over the coming months, we are planning to reduce the size of our total workforce by roughly 10 percent. These reductions will include executives, managers and employees. Next week, your leadership team will share more tailored information about what this means for your organization. Based on this decision, we will not proceed with the next cycle of furloughs.
As we move through this process, we will maintain our steadfast focus on safety, quality and delivering for our customers. We know these decisions will cause difficulty for you, your families and our team, and I sincerely wish we could avoid taking them. However, the state of our business and our future recovery require tough actions.
We will be transparent with you regarding the timing and impact of these steps, and we will be professional and supportive to everyone along the way.
Thank you for all that you are doing through this very challenging time at Boeing. We will navigate through this moment. We will re-focus our company, and we will restore trust with all those who depend on us.
Kelly
Business
The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise
Tesla made sure its Optimus robots were a big part of its extravagant, in-person Cybercab reveal last week. The robots mingled with the crowd, served drinks to and played games with guests, and danced inside a gazebo. Seemingly most surprisingly, they could even talk. But it was mostly just a show.
It’s obvious when you watch the videos from the event, of course. If Optimus really was a fully autonomous machine that could immediately react to verbal and visual cues while talking, one-on-one, to human beings in a dimly lit crowd, that would be mind-blowing.
Attendee Robert Scoble posted that he’d learned humans were “remote assisting” the robots, later clarifying that an engineer had told him the robots used AI to walk, spotted Electrek. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote that the robots “relied on tele-ops (human intervention)” in a note, the outlet reports.
There are obvious tells to back those claims up, like the fact that the robots all have different voices or that their responses were immediate, with gesticulation to match.
It doesn’t feel like Tesla was going out of its way to make anyone think the Optimus machines were acting on their own. In another video that Jalopnik pointed to, an Optimus’ voice jokingly told Scoble that “it might be some” when he asked it how much it was controlled by AI.
Another robot — or the human voicing it — told an attendee in a stilted impression of a synthetic voice, “Today, I am assisted by a human,” adding that it’s not fully autonomous. (The voice stumbled on the word “autonomous.”)
Musk first announced Tesla’s humanoid robot by bringing what was very clearly a person in a robot suit on stage, so it’s no surprise that the Optimuses (Optimi? Optimodes?) at last week’s event were hyperbolic in their presentation. And people who went didn’t seem to feel upset or betrayed by that. But if you were hoping to have any sense of how far along Tesla truly is in its humanoid robotics work, the “We, Robot” event wasn’t the place to look.
Business
X blocked hacked JD Vance dossier links after the Trump campaign flagged it
The Presidential campaign of Donald Trump asked X to stop links to a story containing VP nominee JD Vance’s hacked dossier from circulating before X chose to block them, reports The New York Times. X had cited its “rules on posting unredacted private personal information” as its justification for suspending the reporter who first published the dossier in his story.
That’s a markedly different set of actions than those Musk took two years ago after criticizing Twitter’s decision to suppress a 2020 news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He called the choice “a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment” and seeded internal documents related to the decision to certain journalists to report on — which doxxed people in the process.
T…
Business
RedCap, the 5G for wearables and IoT, will get its first devices soon
Both T-Mobile and AT&T have plans to release their first devices soon that run on RedCap, a 5G specification that is tooled for Internet of Things devices, according to Fierce Wireless.
What is RedCap? Great question! Also called “reduced capability” or NR-Light, RedCap is a low-bandwidth version of 5G that’s expected to make certain devices, like wearables, sensors, or surveillance cameras simpler and more power efficient, according to an Oracle document. That could mean cheaper cellular-connected smartwatches, XR glasses, or other portable products that don’t need high-powered antennas and fast throughput last longer on a charge.
AT&T, which began testing the spec on its own network early this year, reportedly plans to release its first NR-Light devices in 2025, Fierce Wireless writes. T-Mobile will launch one of its own before this year is out.
It’s not clear what those devices will be, but AT&T AVP of device architecture Jason Silkes has hinted at what early NR-Light products could look like, telling Fierce in June that the first RedCap devices will probably be cheap mobile hotspots and dongles. Indeed, TCL announced a 5G USB dongle last week, catchily named the TCL Linkport IK511.
Early products could use a modem chipset Qualcomm launched last year called the Snapdragon X35. It listed several companies in its announcement, including T-Mobile and AT&T, that plan to use the modem in future products. Perhaps we’ll hear more during CES early next year. Let the (slow) race to 5G begin.
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