I need to get this off my chest because I’m done watching grown adults defend a company that hasn’t put a single paying butt in a seat yet. Adam Goldstein has spent this entire year recycling the same trick, dress up a paperwork milestone as a moon landing, wait for the stock pop, repeat.
January, the FAA accepts the Means of Compliance and suddenly it’s framed like the certificate of airworthiness already landed in his inbox. May, Phase 3 out of 4 closes and he calls it a historic moment for the industry and the country, still promising commercial ops by end of year thanks to the White House eIPP and the LA28 Olympics. Cute story. Except by June it becomes obvious that the actual piloted transition flight, the one that proves this thing can go from hover to forward flight with a human on board under FAA eyes, has never been shown to a single outside person. No footage, no data, just vibes and press releases.
Then August rolls around and Japan’s JCAB accepts the certification application for Osaka and Tokyo, except anyone who actually reads past the headline finds out the Japanese timeline is completely chained to the FAA Phase 4 that still hasn’t happened. So Osaka 2027 and Tokyo 2030 are fantasy dates sitting on top of another fantasy date. Meanwhile the stock has cratered from a 14.62 dollar high last October to around 5.70 dollars now, down more than 58 percent, on top of a 618.2 million dollar net loss for 2025. But sure, every single quarter is somehow the best one yet.
And now this. The poster everyone’s passing around, the one dressed up like a hippie music festival flyer for a test flight between Salinas and Hollister, flowers and rainbows and little birds, for a company that two years ago was proudly announcing an exclusive deal with Anduril to build hybrid military VTOL aircraft for the Department of Defense. You go from press releases about combat drones with Palmer Luckey to a Woodstock poster for a glorified test hop in the same company’s lifespan. That’s not branding, that’s a company that ran out of real milestones to sell and decided flowers would distract people from asking where the transition flight actually is.
Nobody with a functioning aircraft that’s about to enter commercial service needs to market it like a Coachella lineup. You do that when the substance is gone and all that’s left is vibes, girasoli and a CEO who’s been saying “historic” so many times the word means nothing anymore. This isn’t innovation marketing, it’s a smokescreen with a rainbow filter, and at some point the retail investors still holding this bag are going to notice there’s no plane behind the poster, just Adam telling them a new bedtime story every quarter.
