Tesla's Optimus Project Falls Behind + Intel Cuts 15% of Workforce | The Rundown July 25, 2025

Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Friday, July 25th. In today's episode, we'll tell you about Trump's trip to the Federal Reserve and how it turned into an episode of The Office. We also discuss issues over at Intel and more delays at Tesla. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out about a new executive order that could change college sports. We have a great show for you today. Let's go. Oh. The stock market continued its steady climb up this week with both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq rising about 0.1% on Thursday for another record close. But the real drama yesterday came after the market closed when President Trump stopped by the Federal Reserve Building for a tour with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Now, as we've talked about on the podcast for weeks now, the president has been putting a lot of pressure on Jerome Powell. To cut interest rates, he's even threatened to fire him a couple of times. The president's latest criticism of Jerome Powell has been around the cost overruns for renovating the Fed building. So Trump slapped on his hard hat yesterday and stopped by to check out the renovations himself with Jerome Powell as a tour guide. And during the tour, there was an interaction that is going super viral. Where President Trump and Jerome Powell disagreed on the cost of renovations. It's impossible for me to describe to you how funny this clip is. You have to watch it yourself. It's pure comedy, something straight out of The Office. If you haven't seen the clip yet, go check it out and pay attention to Jerome Powell's facial expressions. Now during this meeting, President Trump once again asked Jerome Powell to cut interest rates, even give him a nice slap on the back. Are there things the chairman can say to you today that would make you back off some of the earlier criticism? Well, I'd love him to lower interest rates, but other than that, what can I tell you? But the president might be disappointed next week when the Fed meets on interest rates, because right now the markets are only pricing in at a 2% chance of a rate cut. So it's probably not happening. But it's gonna be interesting to see what Jerome Powell says in the press conference. He might hint at a rate cut for the September meeting. So I'm definitely gonna be tuning into that on July 30th, and we'll keep you guys in the loop next week. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Tesla. We broke down Tesla's disappointing Q2 earnings on yesterday's show, but we didn't really talk about Tesla's robot program, Optimus. But we just got some new information this morning about Optimus, and it looks like the company is running behind. Elon Musk originally said that Tesla would produce 5,000 Optimus humanoid robots this year, but according to reporting from the information, Tesla's only built a few hundred robots so far. Elon has been hyping up Optimus like it's the company's next big thing. He's claiming that robots could eventually be bigger than the EV business and help push Tesla's market cap to over $2.5 trillion, which is like equivalent to the GDP of the entire United States economy. But hey, Elon's the ultimate hype man, and it's not surprising to hear that Tesla is running into delays. One of the biggest challenges they're trying to overcome right now has to do with the robot's hands. Apparently, building human-like robot hands is a huge technical headache. The thing is, Tesla wants Optimus to be an all-in-one robot with the ability to do handiwork, work on the factory floor, play the piano, fold some clothes. So they need the hands to be just like humans. But they can't seem to get that right. And to make matters worse, Optimus's head of engineering recently quit and a former Tesla employee left to launch his own robot hand startup. But Tesla sued him, accusing him of stealing trade secrets. Elon is not backing down. He's pouring billions of dollars in R&D into developing Optimus, all while Tesla's car business continues to decline. We talked more about that on yesterday's episode. Go check that out if you missed it. Now, Tesla did show off the Optimus robots to the public this week in L.A., where they opened up a futuristic drive-in diner staffed completely by these robots. There was multiple Optimus robots. Serving popcorn to people. Great use for a robot that probably costs millions of dollars to make. I'm still not sure how comfortable people are going to be with robots in their homes. I personally think that robots are best used for industrial use, factories, construction, things like that. Let's shift gears and talk about another company having a hard time right now. Intel. Intel's been going through a rough patch. Pretty much this entire decade, and according to their latest earnings report, things aren't getting any better. The company reported a loss of $2.9 billion in Q2, which is almost double what they reported in Q2 of last year. So their financial health continues to get worse. In fact, this was the company's sixth straight quarter of reporting a loss. That's a tough streak to be on. Now, Intel did bring in a new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who took over the company in March, and he has a lot of work to do to turn things around. He's making some big moves, though. He started off by announcing a ton of cost cuts. Intel is planning to cut 15% of its workforce. They also canceled plans for a new chip factory in Europe. But I mean, zooming out here, Intel's business is getting crushed on all sides. If you look at their chip business, which is what they're known for, they're still dominating market share when it comes to chips used in laptops and desktop computers. But that's not where the big money is anymore. Today, it's all about AI chips, and they don't have anything close compared to NVIDIA or even AMD. And then if you look at their foundry business, which is the manufacturing of these chips, that can't compete with the likes of TSMC, which makes all the cutting-edge chips for NVIDIA, Apple, and more. Intel just doesn't have the technology to manufacture those state-of-the-art chips. So they're getting cooked on all sides here, and that's why their stock has dropped over 25% in the last 12 months. And it's down another 8% this morning in reaction to the earnings. I don't even know what the new CEO can do to turn things around. An idea that I'll throw out there is maybe NVIDIA or AMD should buy them. I mean, Intel is worth less than $100 billion. Now, that's nothing for NVIDIA. I don't know if the regulators would allow it, but Intel needs all the help they can get. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Yay. Decker's shares are jumping this morning after the shoe giant beat earnings estimates because of solid performance in both their Hoka and Uggs brands. Hoka saw a near 17% increase in sales for the quarter, while Uggs was around 19%. That was a nice bounce back for the two brands, which saw a slowdown in growth in the previous quarter. The acceleration in growth has investors feeling bullish again about the company, and Decker's is up more than 12% this morning on this news. Sticking with the winners here, shares of Paramount are up more than 1% this morning after the FCC finally approved the $8 billion takeover of the company by Skydance Media. This deal was announced over a year ago, and it's been tied up in regulatory reviews since then, but it was finally given the green light. Paramount made some headlines last week after they canceled the late show with Stephen Colbert, which they said was purely a financial decision and due to the decline of cable TV. And that brings us to the losers, because speaking of cable TV, shares of Charter communications are plummeting this morning after the cable giant missed earnings estimates. Charter owns Spectrum Cable, and their revenues only grew by point six percent year over year. The company reported a loss of more than four hundred thousand subscribers across their video, Internet and wireless voice services, which just proves that cable continues to slowly die. Now, Charter recently agreed to a deal to acquire Cox Communications, For nearly $35 billion, these cable companies are consolidating to save whatever they can of their business. And if this deal gets approved, it would add an additional six and a half million subs to Charter's 31 million subs overall. But investors are nervous about the future. Shares of Charter are down more than 11% this morning in reaction to the earnings. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. President Trump just signed an executive order that could impact NIL money in college sports. This new executive order prohibits third parties from pay to play payments to college athletes. These kind of deals have turned college football almost into a professional league. Every year during the transfer portal, thousands of players switch schools for the highest paid. A great example of that is Larry Ellison, who's worth over $200 billion, depending on what day you check. He reportedly helped flip the top high school quarterback Bryce Underwood from going to LSU to signing with Michigan instead by backing a $10 million NIL deal through a group called Champion Circle. So essentially, the rich guys are able to get the best players in college sports now. The White House says these bidding wars are threatening the financial stability of college sports and draining resources from smaller programs, especially women's and non-revenue sports. With all the money going towards college football and basketball, there becomes less money left over for the other sports. Now, the important caveat here is that this is just an executive order. It's not a law, which means that it's more of a policy directive. So we'll see what kind of impact that actually has. Now, my perspective here as a casual college football watcher. is pretty mixed. Like on one hand, I want these student athletes to get paid. But the current system isn't great either with players switching schools every year. And I'm saying this as someone who went to a big school, the University of Texas, that has a lot of money to get all the best players. I want to see some sort of middle ground where college athletes can make money without feeling like they need to hit the transfer portal every year. I don't know how you do that, but the current system is pretty broken. All right, that's enough college football talk for now. Our international listeners are probably so confused. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. Got to say action-packed week, and it's only going to get better next week with the Fed meeting, with the tariff deadline, and big tech earnings from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and more. So there's a lot going on over the next week or so. Make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast to stay in the loop, especially over the next couple of weeks. Thank you guys so much for listening. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes. We'll see you guys back here this weekend for the deep dive.