Morning Brew Daily - 'Roomba' Maker iRobot Files for Bankruptcy & ‘Zootopia 2’ Rakes in $1B

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Episode 736: Neal and Toby explain why Roomba maker iRobot filed for bankruptcy and what it means for the company moving forward. Then, Ford is losing money on their electric vehicles and Zootopia pulls in $1 billion at the box office. Next up why companies are seeking “storytellers” and the headlines you need to know to start your day.  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Visit public.com/morningbrew to learn more Paid endorsement. Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Not investment advice. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and investment values may rise or fall. See terms of match program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today the hottest new corporate job is storyteller. Then Ford's push into EVs is going worse than Neil trying to parallel park. It's Tuesday, December 16th.

Let's ride. I am a great parallel parker, actually. I learned on the mean streets of South Philadelphia where everyone is watching you. even have a backup camera at that time. So I just want to clear the air there. I'm a good parallel Parker. But I don't want to talk about that. What I do want to talk about to start the show is Mariah Carey. The Queen of Christmas has made music history after her ubiquitous holiday bop. All I want for Christmas is you. Notch 20 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the longest reign of any song in the chart's 67 year history. What's also remarkable is that this

song didn't hit number one for the first time until 2019, 25 years after it was released in 1994. Toby, I think it is extremely well deserved. All I want has got infectious energy, classic Christmas flourishes, an impeccable vocal, and enough complexity to keep you listening again and again, musicologists have identified 13 different chords in the song far more than the average pop track. Never heard it. Do you want to sing it for me, Neil, as you're parallel parking for me? Now, I think this is indicative of just the holiday music craze era that we are in right now because I want you to pull out your phone right now and check the top 50 songs in the U.S. on Spotify. 33 of them are Christmas related in some way amongst stalwarts like Taylor Swift's,

Ophelia, Golden from K-pop Demon Hunters. It's a sea of Christmas songs right now. If you had done the same thing back in 2019, just around 15 Christmas songs would, appear as of the start of December. So we all have a little bit of the case of the blue blaze right now. I think it's comfort music for us as it goes a long way in times of, you know, economic uncertainty, just putting on the old classics. You say it's just you don't have to think about what to listen to you. Just, hey, let's listen to the Christmas music. It's December right now. So it is fascinating, though, just how popular Christmas music has become even over the last decade. And now we're from

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It's because the company that makes it just went bankrupt. On Sunday night, Rumba Maker, iRobot filed for chapter 11 and agreed to be taken over by its Chinese supplier. It's a disappointing chapter for a 35-year-old company that pioneered the way humans and robots interacted. When iRobot released the Rumba back in 2002, it made the average person feel like they were living in the Jetsons, a robot that vacuumed the house for us. Truly, this was the future that was promised. But other companies got hit to the game and intense competition from Asia slowly ate away at the Rumba's profits. Then tariffs gobbled up all the rest. especially the 46% rate on Vietnam, where Roomba's were made and then shipped to the U.S.

Irobot was thrown a lifeline in 2022 when Amazon agreed to buy it for $1.7 billion, but that deal fell through following antitrust scrutiny from the U.S. and the EU. The good news for Roomba owners, your robot vacuum won't immediately become a brick. Irobot says that despite the bankruptcy, it's business as usual, your robots will continue to vacuum while you sit on the couch, and it expects no disruptions to operations. Toby, it's a small company, I-Robot, but its story sits at the intersection of so many big forces, globalization, antitrust, AI, and robotics. I do just want to give I-Robot its credit here.

Roomba still is big. I-Robot controls 42% of the U.S. roboc vacuum market. It's sort of like Kleenex. It's just the, when you talk about a little robot going around and cleaning your floor, most people just call it a Roomba inherently because it created the category to begin with. But you're right. just so many things were piling up. This was not necessarily a surprise. Last year, the company said that we have a going concern. We're not sure if we're going to continue operating because of just

all this competition, all these tariffs coming down the pipeline. It did have a momentary moment in the sun a few weeks ago in the stock market, at least, because Trump and the Trump administration said that, hey, we're going to start prioritizing robotics. So shares of iRobot literally probably because it has the name robot in its stock ticker, shot up 80%. It had his best one-day trade ever. And now it's unfortunately down 80% yesterday on news of its bankruptcy. Really interesting founding story, too, about iRobot. It is an old company.

You know, it dates back to the 90s. It was founded in 1990, actually, by three researchers at MIT. They had been studying the way insects move around. They've been studying this all throughout the 80s and how they make very complacent. systems and they translated that to robotics. And then in the early 90s and early 2000s, these robots were deployed with U.S. ground troops. They searched the World Trade Center after 9-11 and they monitored an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. So a lot of military industrial uses. And then in 2002, these guys said, okay, what if we actually made something for the

consumer? So they released the Roomba in 2002. And since then, you know, it's been a very successful product. It sold more than 50 million units created the category. but there was all this competition. They've been forced to cut their prices because of all, you know, this has happened across the economy. Chinese low, low cost goods have been flooding into the markets all around the world, forcing domestic companies to cut their prices and their profits just cratered as a result, pile on $23 million in tariffs and this company needed to sell.

And the big iconic part of iRobots lore is this failed Amazon acquisition. A lot of people pointed to this saying like, hey, this is. is why antitrust concerns are not necessarily always a good thing because now iRobot is owned by a Chinese supplier instead of an American tech company. But some people did flood in the comments say it was mostly actually European regulators that had an issue with this deal. They didn't want too many eyes and ears in your home because Amazon was making this push for the smart home. So they did end up cracking down on that deal. You can't tell the story of iRobot without telling the story of this failed Amazon acquisition that might have been the lifeline and needed.

Maybe it was never going to be a success in the current environment with just all the competition out there. But you can't tell the story of Irobot without telling the story of this failed Amazon acquisition. Moving on, you ever come back from a night out and see a regrettable credit card bill? Well, Ford is getting the Sunday scaries to the tune of $19.5 billion. The automaker announced yesterday that its foray into electric vehicles cost the company $19.5 billion in the form of an impairment. its biggest admission yet that its EV ambitions were misjudged. This one time write-down is one of the largest ever taken by a U.S. company, something that Ford CEO Jim Farley tried his best to spin as a good thing.

Instead of plowing billions into the future knowing these large EVs will never make money, we are pivoting, Farley said. We now know enough about the U.S. market, where we have a lot more certainty in the second inning of its EV push. As part of the restructuring, Ford is canceling some of its carefully laid plans. It's canning one of its planned electric F-series trucks and converting its once-buzzy F-150 lightning into an extended range hybrid instead of a pure EV. It's also repurposing some of its battery plants to pump out good old-fashioned gas and hybrid

vehicles instead. The two-headed monster of regulatory changes and tepid consumer demand revealed cracks in its initial EV push, forcing the company to nail its second act, which will center on a cheaper $30,000 EV pickup that it hopes to sell by 2027. Neil Farley said, this is now the core of our EV strategy in America. Speaking of lower cost cars, we've got to land the plane. Never good when you have an auto CEO making plain metaphors. Well, this push into EVs by automakers was a worse bet than my Buccaneers minus five pick on Sunday.

And I mean, much worse. Ford was literally letting $100 bills on fire for years. Go back to April 2024, which is the most recent data available. Ford was losing $132,000 on each electric vehicle that it sold. It's lost $13 billion in total on its EV business from 2021 to 2024. If you hear automaker CEOs talk about it from Mary Barr at GM to Jim Farley at Ford, they're saying that they got ahead of the consumer. And some of this has to do with government incentives to push these automakers to make electric vehicles.

But the consumer was just not there. They never caught on in a big way. at least yet here in the United States, but many reasons for that, whether it's the high cost or not enough chargers or the fact that gas is below $3 a gallon now, but for whatever reason, that automakers got way ahead of the consumer,

and now that they say to a T, we're following where the customer is going and the customer is still buying hybrids and they're still buying internal combustion engine cars. Yeah, I think Farley is saying, knowing these large EVs will never make money, that was where they miscalibrated a little bit because one thing Americans do love is big cars.

That is where a lot of these companies make their money. You know, big SUVs, no longer sedans. We've talked about this a lot on the show, how every automaker is pivoting away from these smaller cars into making more money on selling bigger cars. So you would think, what do they want in the EV market? You want these big, you know, hulking American vehicles. But it turns out that is not the case,

which is why they're kind of recalibrating around this $30,000 pickup truck, is more affordable, a little smaller in scale, and hybrids. Hybrids is the other part of this push is that maybe we just weren't ready to go all in on EVs. Honda has calibrated this really well while everyone was making the full pivot, building all these battery factories. They kind of said, we're going to wait and see and do the half measure of literally a hybrid. So it is interesting to see them say that we now know what the American consumer wants. It's smaller, cheaper EVs and or hybrids. Now, some analysts are quite skeptical that these automakers can pull off what they're saying.

They're saying we can do this balancing act where we still lean into gas powered cars and hybrids, but at the same time win this global EV race against China because right now the Detroit Big Three, they collectively have less than 5% of the global EV market. The top three EV sellers are Tesla, Gile, and BYD. They contain, they together have nearly 40%. So they're saying you're trying to have it both ways here, Ford and GM. to lean into more gas-powered cars and you're winding down operations for a lot of your biggest EV sellers. And at the same time, you want to grab market share. You're saying that Chinese

EVs are about to take over the world and you want to compete against them. Well, how are you doing both? You're investing in more gas-powered cars instead of EVs. You're pulling billions of dollars out of that. It's not clear how you can win this global EV race when these other companies, especially in China, are going all in with these lower-priced cars. And you're still making gas guzzlers. So that is, I think there's some skepticism around whether they can pull off this balancing act. Judy Hopps and Nick Wild are the animal buddy cops the world needed right now. After another strong weekend in theaters, Zootopia 2 has crossed $1.1 billion at the global box office, becoming the biggest Hollywood movie of 2025.

Moving into second place is the Lilo and Stitch live action remake, giving Disney the first and second slots on the leaderboard and the only studio to produce two $1 billion movies this year. Zootopia 2 owes its stunning success to one market in particular, China. Chinese audiences have been obsessed with Zootopia since the first one arrived in 2016, and they showed up in force for the sequel. With over $500 million in Chinese box office receipts so far, it's broken all kinds of records for an American movie in China and could top Avengers Endgame as the highest grossing Hollywood film there.

And even more remarkable, it comes at a time when U.S. movies have largely pulled back from Chinese theaters. While China used to be a very lucrative market for American studios, it is the second largest theater market in the world, after all. Domestic movies have squeezed out Hollywood productions in the last decade or so. Many Hollywood movies are banned from China by the government or they're subject to tight censorship. Some massive global blockbusters like Top Gun Maverick and Spider-Man No Way Home decided to skip China altogether rather than undergo Beijing-friendly edits. But somehow, those sly foxes at Zootopia managed to thread the needle and they're laughing all the way to the bank. are so many trend bucking elements of Zootopia right now. One, just the fact that we thought

Disney was kind of over the hill when it comes to animation. They weren't making good movies anymore. Nope, still got their fastball. Zootopia is a great movie. The other trend that they're bucking is that, yeah, American movies said, we don't actually need you, China. Top Gun Maverick made $1.4 billion worldwide. That is obviously, you know, a very pro-American movie, so did not air in China. Did absolutely fine. Spider-Man, No Way Home. same thing, $1.9 billion worldwide. So Hollywood was saying, there are other markets out there. We can do just fine without you.

But it is nice when you do have China because it is a massive theater market. Zootopia made over $100 million in one day in China. So obviously, if you can get your movie over there, you're going to want to because look at how well this movie is doing. And this was no accident. Disney went all out on Zootopia after seeing how successful it was in 2016. in China. They're the only Zootopia land at a theme park is at Shanghai Disneyland.

They did a partnership with China Eastern Airlines to create a Zootopia to plane. So they really put their thumb on the scale here to create that patented Disney flywheel where they kept people buying merchant interested in these characters from 2016 until now when they came back in force to the theater. So Disney did these really creative marketing strategies. They leaned into the year of the snake and just really, know what's going on in that local market, and now they made $500 million in China on this movie.

So really smart strategic plays by China, or by Disney, in order to grab that market in China and make a lot of money off of it. I just like that the sloss talk really slow in Zootopia. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm excited to see Zootopia too. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a story about storytelling.

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Today's Toby Trend is all about the sudden boom in job postings searching for storytellers. Microsoft is hiring a senior director of narrative and storytelling. Notion has a 10-person storytelling team, while USAA is hiring its fourth staff storyteller, which is about four more than you'd expect for a military-focused financial services company. Over on LinkedIn, there's been an outbreak of. storytellers. The percentage of job postings that referenced the term doubled in the past year with more than 70,000 self-proclaimed storytellers across marketing, media, and communications. It's happening at the upper echelons of companies, too. Executive use storyteller or storytelling

469 times through December 11th, up from 147 times a decade ago. What is a storyteller? It's sort of a modern Frankenstein's calm monster, part media relations manager, part corporate writer, part content marketer, and 100% a new rebrand of an old position that tech companies love pulling off. Maybe a decade ago, this would be called a Story Ninja or a Words Guru. Now the invoke title is storyteller. Neil, unfortunately, I think we're storytellers too. Should we update our LinkedIn's? I mean, podcaster is bad enough to have that as your title. This is something that companies do when a department maybe has a little taboo around it.

They change the name to get people thinking that it's something else. There are a lot of HR departments that are now people operations, and this is exactly what's going on. So I'm sure a lot of you listening to this are rolling your eyes. But at the same time, you might be applying because these storytellers make a lot of money. The compliance technology from Vanta began hiring for a head of storytelling this month. The salary is up to $274,000, which shows you how in demand or important communications are for big companies. There was a lot of eye rolling when it comes to this, as you said. But also, there were some people saying this is justified because if you think of the Venn diagram of people who maybe get the tech of a compliance firm like Vanta, who get people and understand how to talk their language and also make complex things easy for people to understand, there is not a lot.

lot of people that isn't actually very unique and in-demand skill set right now, especially because there's just fewer journalists out there that you can go to and say, hey, tell my company's story. Now you've got to take it into your own hands. You know, social media is where you have to tell your company's story. So I obviously, I would say about five to one. There was five people saying this is so ridiculous. Like, why do we rebrand these very normal comps positions into something like storyteller? But then the 1% was saying, like, absolutely, these are.

exactly what you need to thrive as a company right now. So we should, one, call them this and two, pay them a lot of money. I don't think we should stop at storytelling. If we're calling them storytelling, let's just go all the way in. I'm thinking we hire a spinner of yarns, a chronicler or a bard. Bard, bring back barge, actually. They used to be, you know, the hot thing going around. I like Bard.

I'm a bard. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Australian leaders vowed to immediately introduce tighter gun restrictions in response to the terrorist attack that tart. to the Jewish community at a Hanukkah gathering on Sunday. 15 people died, marking the worst mass shooting in the country in nearly 30 years. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said several measures were on the table, including limiting the number of guns someone can own and reviewing licenses over time.

Australia has a history of moving rapidly to curb firearm access following mass shootings. After that 1996 shooting that killed 35 people, Australia quickly banned assault rifles and many semi-automatics in addition to shotguns. And gun ownership is rising again, which is why also in conjunction with this shooting, there is a lot of momentum around tightening gun laws again. There are more than 4 million guns in circulation. That's up 25% compared to 1996, which was when those first gun regulations were enacted. So it does seem like there is just broad momentum around this, obviously in the wake of such a tragedy as well. Next up, Nick Reiner, the 32-year-old son of Hollywood director, Rob Reiner, has been arrested

on suspicion of murder and the deaths of his parents. Nick had publicly struggled with drug abuse throughout his life, with he and his father actually making a scripted movie together based on his experiences with drug addiction called being Charlie back in 2016. According to one anonymous source, Nick and Rob got into an argument at a holiday party the night before the couple's bodies were discovered too. Trump is also being criticized for a post on true social

where he indicated the deaths of Reiner and his wife were, quote, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive unyielding and incurable affliction with the mind-cripling disease known as Trump derangement syndrome. Authorities say, though, that there is no indication that political beliefs had anything to do with their deaths. There's been a lot of great remembrances around Rob Reiner, and one of my favorites is that, you know, so he made when Harry met Sally. Now, that movie was supposed to end with them not being together, which is kind of unthinkable.

but Reiner met Michelle Singer, his future wife, on the set of when Harry met Sally, and he just fell so much in love that he changed the ending of when Harry met Sally to them being together at the end. So I thought that was just very poignant. And others were sharing the fact that his movie history, his run in the 80s and 90s, like was a hotter hand than Steph Curry going off from 3. From 1984 was, this is Spinal Tap. the sure thing stand by me, the princess bride when Harry met Sally, misery, and a few good

men. So from 1984 to 1992, this guy had the hottest hand of any director in cinema history. And, you know, there was just a lot of wonderful remembrances about him and his wife, who was actually, his wife actually photographed Donald Trump for the cover of the art of the deal. So just crazy story here. All right, Merriam Webster released its word of the year for 2025. And I'll give you the definition first to see if you, can guess it. Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. That's right, it's Slop, the derogatory term given to the AI generated media that's filled up our feeds this year. Slop didn't always mean that, of course, first being

used in the 1700s to mean soft mud, but now it's commonly associated with things of low value, digital media, yes, but also food as in bowl slop. Toby Slop definitely captures some of the pushback that people have had against AI the right choice? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I got to give you your flowers here because you called Slop back when all these words first started coming out. You're like, it's got to be Slop, right? And it was Slop. There's almost an air of defiance around Slop as well where it shows that one that you can recognize that something is AI generated. And then two, that you think it is not of the same quality as a human output. So calling something Slop is signaling like, hey, I understand what's going on in the current environment, which is

is exactly what Marion Webster did right here. This is the right word to describe what is going on right now. Unfortunately, I do love bowl slop, which is the food aspect of this. The AI slop, you know, I will not comment on. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. If you want to get in touch, you can send a note to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lou is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. We are hiring a storyteller to replace hair and makeup.

Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. Let's run it back tomorrow.