Nobody noticed, because the corpse is still fresh. Nobody would notice for a while.
But the CEO left. Robert Playter, February 27, 2026, after 30 years at the company.
CTO Aaron Saunders gone to Google DeepMind.
COO gone.
Chief Strategy Officer Marc Theermann gone.
The whole c-suite walked out within months of each other. Former employees told Semafor they were pushed out by a board critical of the company's narrowing lead against competitors.
What did they see that we didn't?
Number one, the whole point of a robotics company is to sell robots.
But Boston Dynamics doesn't actually sell robots. If they do, please send me the link, I want to buy an Atlas. Their sales team doesn't even check their emails.
Number two, Boston Dynamics has bad DNA to be a company.
Don't get me wrong, they did amazing work. They spun out of MIT in 1992, founded by Marc Raibert, funded almost entirely by DARPA military contracts.
They were never a company. They were a lab with a logo.
I suspect they never got out of their research phase. They hired people with a research mindset, and that's why nobody questioned why the fuck they were building things with no commercial use.
Youtubification.
Boston Dynamics went viral everywhere before virality was even a thing. But that's about it, and they are still trying to do that.
See the last Atlas video of it lifting a fridge. Very impressive but impractical. I bet it can't open the door and hand it to me. The world has moved on. It only works on novelty, which I don't think they've figured out. (An article about Figure coming soon.)
There's zero excuse to fumble the bag like this. You had a 34-year head start.
Their financials are even worse.
Google bought them in December 2013 for an undisclosed amount. Then sold to SoftBank in June 2017 for $165 million, because they weren't going to be profitable fast enough. SoftBank then sold 80% to Hyundai in December 2020 for approximately $880 million.
Nobody plays hot potato with a good company.
I feel bad for Hyundai because it's basically holding the bag. From 2022 to Q3 2025, Boston Dynamics made $266 million while losing $938 million. Hyundai has pumped $2.23 billion in just to keep the corpse fresh.
I bet fewer than 500 robots have ever left their factory, including failed prototypes. So even if they come up with a genius Atlas model, they won't be able to manufacture it at the scale it requires.
Hyundai thought it could fix her. So far, $2.23 billion wasted and counting.
Let's talk about AI.
Boston Dynamics will never create a robot that achieves full autonomy. (I can tattoo Boston Dynamics on my forehead if they do.)
Number one, they don't have the talent.
Number two, they don't have the ecosystem for it. Just look at their GitHub repo.
So even if you bought a robot from them and wanted to run your own policy, good luck.
Unitree did what Boston Dynamics should have been doing all along.
It created cheap enough robots and handed them to labs and developers. Even if Unitree never creates a fully autonomous robot, that's okay, because thousands of devs are creating, experimenting, and breaking things. Unitree has already won. Selling hardware, keeping software and SDK open.
If you are a Hyundai executive, please push Boston Dynamics to ship.
Half done, fully done, whatever. Developers don't care. Ship the goddamn Atlas. Let us play, let us build and experiment with policies, let us collect data. Don't treat it like a treasure. Robots belong to your customers, not to you.
I am writing all this and screaming into the void because I don't want Boston Dynamics to die.
It inspired me to dream about a future where robots are ubiquitous in human life. I am currently on the first step of that dream.
So please, Boston Dynamics, don't give up.
There's no such thing as a dead robot, only a dead company.
sammo3x•45m ago
So Boston Dynamite imploded recently.
Nobody noticed, because the corpse is still fresh. Nobody would notice for a while.
But the CEO left. Robert Playter, February 27, 2026, after 30 years at the company.
CTO Aaron Saunders gone to Google DeepMind. COO gone. Chief Strategy Officer Marc Theermann gone.
The whole c-suite walked out within months of each other. Former employees told Semafor they were pushed out by a board critical of the company's narrowing lead against competitors.
What did they see that we didn't?
Number one, the whole point of a robotics company is to sell robots.
But Boston Dynamics doesn't actually sell robots. If they do, please send me the link, I want to buy an Atlas. Their sales team doesn't even check their emails.
Number two, Boston Dynamics has bad DNA to be a company.
Don't get me wrong, they did amazing work. They spun out of MIT in 1992, founded by Marc Raibert, funded almost entirely by DARPA military contracts.
They were never a company. They were a lab with a logo.
I suspect they never got out of their research phase. They hired people with a research mindset, and that's why nobody questioned why the fuck they were building things with no commercial use.
Youtubification.
Boston Dynamics went viral everywhere before virality was even a thing. But that's about it, and they are still trying to do that.
See the last Atlas video of it lifting a fridge. Very impressive but impractical. I bet it can't open the door and hand it to me. The world has moved on. It only works on novelty, which I don't think they've figured out. (An article about Figure coming soon.)
There's zero excuse to fumble the bag like this. You had a 34-year head start.
Their financials are even worse.
Google bought them in December 2013 for an undisclosed amount. Then sold to SoftBank in June 2017 for $165 million, because they weren't going to be profitable fast enough. SoftBank then sold 80% to Hyundai in December 2020 for approximately $880 million.
Nobody plays hot potato with a good company.
I feel bad for Hyundai because it's basically holding the bag. From 2022 to Q3 2025, Boston Dynamics made $266 million while losing $938 million. Hyundai has pumped $2.23 billion in just to keep the corpse fresh.
I bet fewer than 500 robots have ever left their factory, including failed prototypes. So even if they come up with a genius Atlas model, they won't be able to manufacture it at the scale it requires.
Hyundai thought it could fix her. So far, $2.23 billion wasted and counting.
Let's talk about AI.
Boston Dynamics will never create a robot that achieves full autonomy. (I can tattoo Boston Dynamics on my forehead if they do.)
Number one, they don't have the talent. Number two, they don't have the ecosystem for it. Just look at their GitHub repo.
So even if you bought a robot from them and wanted to run your own policy, good luck.
Unitree did what Boston Dynamics should have been doing all along.
It created cheap enough robots and handed them to labs and developers. Even if Unitree never creates a fully autonomous robot, that's okay, because thousands of devs are creating, experimenting, and breaking things. Unitree has already won. Selling hardware, keeping software and SDK open.
If you are a Hyundai executive, please push Boston Dynamics to ship.
Half done, fully done, whatever. Developers don't care. Ship the goddamn Atlas. Let us play, let us build and experiment with policies, let us collect data. Don't treat it like a treasure. Robots belong to your customers, not to you.
I am writing all this and screaming into the void because I don't want Boston Dynamics to die.
It inspired me to dream about a future where robots are ubiquitous in human life. I am currently on the first step of that dream.
So please, Boston Dynamics, don't give up.
There's no such thing as a dead robot, only a dead company.