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• Corporate executives who gathered at last month’s Yale CEO Caucus were surveyed on when they should collectively voice their concerns about President Donald Trump, and most said it would take a 20% drop in the stock market. The Nasdaq and Russell 2000 have already entered bear market territory, while the S&P 500 is getting closer.

CEOs have largely avoided public criticism of President Donald Trump as he rolled out his tariffs, but the recent stock market carnage may trigger a change.

Dozens of top corporate executives who gathered at last month’s Yale CEO Caucus were surveyed in an impromptu poll on when the stock market should cause them to collectively voice their concerns about Trump.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 44% of CEOs said a 20% drop, 22% said a 30% decline, 10% said a 50% crash, and 24% said it’s not their role.

The question didn’t specify the starting point for measuring the market loss. By some measures, stocks have crossed or are near the 20% threshold.

The Nasdaq and Russell 2000 have tumbled more than 20% from their 52-week highs, entering bear market territory. The S&P 500 is down 17%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off 15%.

The losses are less steep, however, if you start from Trump’s inauguration or when the poll was conducted in mid-March. Still, the two-day stock rout after “Liberation Day” wiped out $6 trillion in market cap and marked the worst meltdown since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

To be sure, some executives have reportedly voiced concerns about tariffs behind closed doors in earlier meetings with the president and his staff. But in public, they have remained reticent to avoid angering Trump.

Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who organized the March summit, told the Journal on Saturday that top CEOs have expressed frustration to him, but think trade groups should more forcefully oppose the tariffs or make collective statements.

“They don’t want to be the lightning rod,” he said. “Then it becomes personalized to them.”

Similarly, an unnamed board member of a US company told the Financial Times on Friday, “You don’t want to be the barking dog for everyone else because you’re going to be the one who will get shot.”

Another corporate board member told the FT the best approach is to lobby Trump and his advisers privately and say that tariffs would hit his core constituents with higher prices and unemployment.

For its part, the Business Roundtable said in a statement on Wednesday that it supports Trump’s goal of securing fairer trade deals but warned “universal tariffs ranging from 10-50% run the risk of causing major harm to American manufacturers, workers, families and exporters.”

But there may be signs of more opposition from Corporate America.

Trump adviser Elon Musk appeared to break with the White House’s trade war on Saturday, when the Tesla CEO expressed hope for a “zero-tariff” system between the US and Europe that would create “a free-trade zone.”

And earlier on Saturday, Musk belittled White House official Peter Navarro, who was reportedly a key figure on the tariff policy, suggesting on X that his Harvard degree is “a bad thing” and that he has never built anything.

Meanwhile, tech journalist Kara Swisher posted on Threads on Friday that “a passel of high profile tech and also finance leaders is making a trip to Mar-a-Lago to read Trump the riot act — um talk common sense — to him on the tariffs.”

She added that Musk was also in their crosshairs for “his ‘idiotic chainsaw’ antics and more,” alluding to the drastic cuts to federal agencies this his Department of Government Efficiency is spearheading.

The White House and Tesla didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave no indication that Trump will back off from this aggressive tariffs and said there doesn’t have to be a recession, despite Wall Street pricing in greater odds of a downturn this year.

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, he also downplayed the massive stock selloff as a short-term reaction.

“One thing that I can tell you, as the Treasury secretary, what I’ve been very impressed with is the market infrastructure, that we had record volume on Friday. And everything is working very smoothly so the American people, they can take great comfort in that,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When Figure AI, a high-profile humanoid robot startup, announced a commercial agreement with automaker BMW early last year, it was a signal to venture investors and the rest of the robotics industry that the young company was one of the innovators to watch – and to beat – in this cutting edge sector.

Recent comments by Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock, along with videos produced by the company, gave the impression that a new era of robo-manufacturing was firmly at hand. But a closer look at the details of the partnership reveals a far more modest affair – at least currently – that suggests Figure’s humanoid car-building workforce may be as much hype as reality and which raises questions about the sincerity of Adcock’s comments. 

Up until sometime in March, a Figure robot at BMW’s South Carolina factory operated only during off-hours, practicing picking up and placing parts in the plant’s body shop, according to a BMW spokesperson — even though Adcock boasted in February that a “fleet” of Figure’s humanoid robots were already performing “end-to-end operations” for the carmaker. More recently, that same robot work has moved into live production hours but involves a single Figure robot performing the same limited chore, the spokesperson said. 

BMW declined to comment on the disparities between what Adcock had publicized in February and what the auto giant said was the reality at the time, referring those questions to Adcock. The serial entrepreneur and representatives for the company have not responded to requests for clarification or comment. 

The questions come as sci-fi like humanoid robots are having a moment. While Elon Musk-directed efforts to build a humanoid called Optimus inside Tesla has played a central role in building hype for the futuristic form factor, Figure’s commercial agreement stood out as one of the first real-world deployments in the U.S. Figure has raised more than $700 million since its 2022 founding from investors including Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel Capital, and Jeff Bezos, via his investment firm. Reuters reported in February that Figure AI was attempting to raise another $1.5 billion at a valuation approaching $40 billion. 

Other tech giants, from Nvidia to OpenAI, have all launched robot-focused initiatives as expectations build for a potential market opportunity that investment management firm ARK pegged in the trillions of dollars in a bullish report last fall. Agility Robotics, which inked a deal for its own humanoids to move containers inside a Spanx apparel warehouse, is reportedly raising $400 million. That comes after Austin-based Apptronik and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based X1 recently raised $350 million and $100 million in funding, respectively. 

When Figure announced the BMW partnership in January of 2024, a press release described the agreement as “a milestone-based” staged approach. While Figure referred to  a “commercial” agreement, none of the parties have disclosed the financial terms nor duration of the deal.

How many droids make a ‘fleet’?

Among the mechanical bipeds vying for a piece of the pie, Figure’s humanoids are among the sharpest-looking. Compared to some of the bulkier or clumsy-looking droids made by other companies, the matte-gray-and-black Figure 02 model cuts a sleek figure, with six cameras for eyes, on-board AI, and hands dexterous enough to pour a glass of milk.

In February, Adcock reminded his LinkedIn network that the BMW deal had been inked one year earlier, writing, “We signed our first commercial customer, BMW, a year ago,” his LinkedIn post read. “We currently have a fleet of robots performing end-to-end operations.”

At the time, I reached out to BMW to try to get more details on the fleet of robots and what the end-to-end operations entailed. To my surprise, though, BMW spokesperson Steve Wilson said there was only a single Figure robot working in their South Carolina auto plant at any given time, and that the humanoid was picking up and maneuvering parts “during non-production hours.” When later pressed, Wilson would not say if these one-robot tests were due to there being just one solitary Figure humanoid at the factory, or if the carmaker had multiple Figure humanoids taking turns practicing tasks. 

He added that “very soon, the Figure robot will begin loading parts for short intervals during live production,” but declined to offer a more specific timeline. This would be similar work to that which was being tested in off-hours, but in a real production environment. 

The production-hours work that Figure’s humanoid would eventually do, Wilson explained, would involve a single robot performing a single task at any given time, in the plant’s body shop – where metal sheet panels are eventually assembled to form the vehicle’s chassis. According to Wilson, the robot would pick up “parts with two hands from a logistics container and place the parts onto a fixture” inside a contained work cell where another type of robot would “begin welding the parts together.” It sounded like a far more limited job than the “end-to-end operations” that Adcock said his droids were already doing.

In early March, Adcock discussed the BMW deal while speaking at a conference. “We actually have them running everyday now,” he said of the humanoids. “They’re there today running in their largest plant.” It’s not clear if BMW had by then started using Figure’s robot technology for production work, but even if it were the case, Adcock’s description once again seemed to stretch the scope of the project versus what was described by the BMW official. 

Turn the music up!

On Monday, Adcock posted a new video to LinkedIn that made clear the Figure humanoid was now officially doing production work at BMW’s factory. “BMW X Figure Update,” the CEO said. “This isn’t a test—this is what autonomous robots in production operations look like. Turn the music up!”

The video indeed displayed the type of work that the BMW official had described–a Figure robot retrieving metal pieces from a mobile shelf, and then walking them over to a work cell where it places them onto a fixture in preparation for welding by other automated equipment. A second Figure robot stood idle next to the one performing the task, before the video zoomed out to show a highly automated plant of which Figure is currently playing a small role. 

Was that second robot part of the “fleet” that Adcock had described, and would it swing into action when the first humanoid ran out of juice? Or was it just a marketing prop? BMW wouldn’t say and Figure is not responding to queries.

No one, especially BMW, is denying that the partnership with Figure is real, nor that the luxury car brand is testing use of the humanoid robot in one of its plants. In fact, Wilson, the BMW spokesperson, said the company will reveal more details during an onsite press event in May. 

But the seeming discrepancies in such a high-profile and potentially seminal deal raise awkward questions for an industry that still needs to prove it’s more than just glossy demo videos and founder-fueled hype. When it comes to humanoids, as with humans, trust is key.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com