Tesla's Optimus Project Falls Behind, Intel Cuts Staff by 15%

Business news update for Monday, July 28th

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Welcome to Capital Currents—where the flow of business news and market trends keeps you ahead of the tide. I am your watch dog and today is Monday, July 28th. 

Before we begin, I wanted to remind everyone we do have a daily newsletter delivered right to your inbox for this podcast if that form of content is what you prefer. We just hit 1k subscribers for the substack and I can’t thank the readers enough. The link is down below in the show notes.

In today's episode, we'll tell you about Trump's trip to the Federal Reserve, we will also discuss issues over at Intel, and finally, more delays at Tesla. We have a great show for you today. Let's go!

The stock market continued its steady climb up this week, with both the S and P and Nasdaq rising about 0.1% for another record close. But the real drama yesterday came when President Trump stopped by the Federal Reserve building for a tour with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. 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. On Friday, Trump put on his hard hat and stopped by to check out the renovations himself with Jerome Powell as a tour guide. During the tour, there was an interaction that is going super viral where President Trump and Jerome Powell disagreed on the cost of renovations. After the public accusation, President Trump once again asked Jerome Powell to cut interest rates and even give him a nice slap on the back. Trump is going to be disappointed next week when the Fed meets on interest rates because right now the markets are only pricing a 2% chance of a rate cut. So it's probably not happening, but it's going to be interesting to see what Jerome Powell says in the press conference. I'm definitely going to be tuning into that on July 30th and I’ll keep you guys in the loop next week.

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Let's run through some headlines, starting with Tesla. We broke down Tesla's disappointing Q2 earnings on Friday’s show, but we didn't really talk about Tesla's robot program, Optimus. Well, we just got some new information 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 Tesla's only built a few hundred robots so far. Elon is claiming that robots could eventually be bigger than the EV business and help push Tesla's market cap to over \$25 trillion, which is equivalent to the GDP of the entire United States economy.

One of the biggest challenges they're trying to overcome right now has to do with the robots hands. 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. 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. Now, Tesla did show off the Optimus robots to the public this week in LA, where they opened up a futuristic drive-in diner staffed completely by these robots, and there were multiple Optimus robots serving popcorn to people. 

Let's shift gears and talk about another company having a hard time right now, Intel. Intel has been going through a rough patch pretty much this entire decade. And a