Month: October 2025

• Boeing’s 777X — which was initially set to debut in 2020 — is delayed yet again, Bloomberg reported.
• The latest delay pushes the timeline to 2027 and is expected to cost billions.
• With about 600 orders from airlines like Lufthansa and Emirates, much is riding on the new widebody.

A lot is riding on Boeing’s new 777X, the world’s largest passenger plane in production. But it has been delayed — again.

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the revolutionary jetliner, featuring folding wingtips and increased fuel economy compared to competitors, is now targeting a 2027 entry to service. That’s seven years later than its original 2020 timeline.

The outlet said German flag carrier and launch customer Lufthansa was removing the 777X from its 2026 fleet plan to account for the new delay, citing sources familiar with the program. More than a dozen airlines have placed about 600 orders for the twin-engine 777X.

Boeing told Business Insider that it is unable to comment due to its pre-earnings quiet period. Lufthansa did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report comes after Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said at a September Morgan Stanley conference that certification issues were pushing the 777X further behind schedule, but he did not give exact timing.

“Even a minor schedule delay on the 777 program has a pretty big financial impact,” he said.

Jefferies analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu said in a Sunday note shared with BI that the latest delay could result in a $4 billion charge.

Aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia told BI on Monday that the “good news” is that this delay does not appear to be due to another technical issue, which contributed to Boeing’s 2024 decision to delay the plane to 2026.

“A lot of it seems to be due to factors that aren’t in their control; FAA bandwidth worsened by a government shutdown,” he said.

Still, the latest setback is another blow to a company still recovering from the 737 Max crisis and raises further questions about Boeing’s ability to engineer and certify new planes — especially since the 777X was supposed to lead Boeing’s comeback.

It’s the planemaker’s only next-generation widebody plane in production, and Boeing needs to prove its modified design was the right strategy over building a jet from scratch.

But every new delay adds financial strain, erodes customer, passenger, and investor trust, forces airlines to absorb the extra costs of operating older planes, and hands Airbus another edge in long-haul market share.

Boeing needs to prove it can safely update an old aircraft

Unlike Airbus’ A350, Boeing based the 777X on its classic 777-300ER but modified it to be larger and more efficient. The 777-300ER is Boeing’s best-selling 777 variant, selling over 800 units since 2000.

Key differences between the two 777 types are the size, engines, and wings. The new plane has wingtips that fold up to ensure it fits in the same gate space as the classic model.

However, this makes safety testing highly complex and thorough — especially in a new regulatory era, where the FAA has tightened certification oversight and no longer allows Boeing to self-certify its planes as freely as it did before.

Operationally, the 777X is similar to its predecessor — and that’s by design. Its flight deck resembles that of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner — meaning pilots can jump between all aircraft with little extra training, and airports save on infrastructure costs.

The 787 was Boeing’s last completely new widebody plane, launched in 2004. While the Dreamliner is a cash cow with over 2,600 orders and about 1,200 delivered, the planemaker wasn’t ready to invest in another challenging, time-consuming, and expensive clean-sheet widebody this time around.

Still, the decision to maintain cockpit familiarity contributed to the failures of Boeing’s 737 Max, as a new system that airlines were not clued into was responsible for crashing two planes in 2018 and 2019.

Similar design flaws on its 777X could further jeopardize Boeing’s chances of revival.

The 777X needs the trust of key Middle Eastern customers

Middle Eastern carriers Emirates, Qatar, and Etihad Airways make up the bulk of the 777X orders.

Emirates has 205 on order, 35 of which are for the smaller 777-8 variant. Qatar and Etihad have ordered 124 and 25 777-9s, respectively.

The 777X’s size and efficiency make it a favorable choice for these carriers’ strong hub-and-spoke networks, which rely on large planes to shuttle as many people as possible between cities at once.

However, the ongoing 777X delays are bad for airlines relying on Boeing to fulfill their demand needs. The longer it remains in development, the longer these carriers have to fly old, costly widebodies — in Emirates’ case, the Airbus A380 quad-jet.

Emirates president Tim Clark has voiced his concern over the various 777X delays in recent years. He told BI in 2024 that the airline already made “significant and highly expensive” fleet adjustments to accommodate Boeing’s “contractual shortfalls.”

However, Aerotime News reported that Clark told media at the 2025 International Air Transport Association Annual General Meeting in June that he was “cautiously optimistic” that Boeing would deliver its 777X to Emirates in “early 2027” and was pleased with Ortberg’s “high degree of determination” in securing 777X certification.

“The important thing is they get it out and it’s certified to the rigours of the new Boeing approach to building aircraft, safety of operations, and all the quality controls that they were having difficulties with before that,” he said.

Aboulafia told BI on Monday that once the 777X hits the market, it will be a “nice enhancement to their financial picture.”

Boeing will continue to hand Airbus market share

Another year’s delay for the 777X means another year that Airbus can sell and deliver its rival A350.

The popular plane, which was a clean-sheet design and outperforms the 777X in terms of price and range, has already secured over 1,400 orders from the likes of Korean Air, Delta Air Lines, and Singapore Airlines. It has delivered about 700.

Emirates received its first A350 before its first 777X — a reverse of what was initially expected.

Still, airlines appear to be willing to wait for the 777X. Despite being more expensive at up to $442 million, the Boeing widebody’s cockpit familiarity and higher-capacity cabin are huge selling points against the A350.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article was first published in 2024.

Also, Gaza peace talks took place in Egypt. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.

• OpenAI showcased internal software tools at its big DevDay conference on Monday.
• The startup discussed GTM Assistant, OpenHouse, and Support Assistant.
• SaaS investors freaked out last week when OpenAI showed off its internal software.

OpenAI told the world about its internal workplace tools last week, and since then, the market has been freaking out about whether the AI startup will someday compete with the SaaS industry with its own software tools.

So, at OpenAI’s big DevDay conference on Monday, I headed straight to a presentation by Scotty Huhn, who is part of a team that builds tools that help OpenAI’s Sales, Customer Success, and Operations teams do their jobs more effectively.

Huhn walked a packed crowd through three OpenAI software tools: GTM Assistant, OpenHouse, and Support Agent.

He made clear these are internal tools at the moment, but after the presentation he was asked whether OpenAI would ever release them as software products in the future. He mostly the dodged the question by saying it is still very early days.

OpenAI wouldn’t be the first company to start selling the internal tools it develops to other businesses. Famously, workplace chat giant Slack used to be a game developer called Tiny Speck, and spun out its messaging tool into a full-fledged business (Salesforce bought Slack for nearly $30 billion in 2020).

Huhn also noted in his presentation, and in comments afterwards, that OpenAI is open-minded about build-versus-buy decisions when it comes to workplace software. If there are better tools out there to buy, OpenAI will do that, he said.

Huhn also noted that OpenAI uses Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s customer-relationship-management software, as a “source of truth” for the startup’s sales teams. OpenAI also uses Workday for HR information, Slack for internal communication, and Databricks for a key data warehousing service, according to his presentation and comments. 

GTM Assistant

The first internal tool Huhn described was OpenAI’s GTM Assistant, which helps the startup’s go-to-market sales team work more efficiently. 

He said some of the skills that were distilled for this tool came from a talented human sales employee called Sophie. 

The tool helps staff with planning for meeting potential clients, customer demos, and follow-ups after these touchpoints. 

Another real human employee at OpenAI had developed about 100 customer demos, and the startup used these to train its GTM Assistant tool to create better demos. Now, this knowledge has been spread among the broader team, which numbers more than 400, Huhn explained. 

Any missing stuff can be called out by employees and fed back into the system, constantly improving it, he added. 

OpenHouse

Next up was OpenHouse, an internal HR tool that taps into existing workplace software, such as Slack and Workday, to help employees connect with each other better and keep up with company policies and other information.

In one example, Huhn shared a recent sales trip to New York. He used OpenHouse to ask if any colleagues there knew about customers and topic areas relevant to his upcoming meetings. 

OpenHouse suggested four or five staffers, and Huhn reached out to a specific person who helped him prepare better. 

Support Agent

The final tool Huhn discussed was Support Agent, which makes OpenAI’s customer support operation more efficient. 

He showed a chart of customer support tickets over the past year or so, with a huge spike in the spring when OpenAI introduced a new image-generation tool, and usage spiked. Interestingly, there was another huge spike in recent weeks, per the chart. 

The tool has improved OpenAI’s support ticket deflection rate, which measures how many customer requests are dealt with quickly and easily. 

More customer questions have been solved, and positive reviews are way up, according to data Huhn shared during the presentation. 

The tool has helped OpenAI bake standards and knowledge into its customer support operation, partly by taking interactions and feeding them back into evaluation processes at the end, which improves the system over time. 

“Find your Sophie”

Huhn finished by pitching the audience on using AI in general to improve their own operations. 

Rather than selling these specific internal tools, he encouraged developers to use OpenAI’s AgentKit service to build their own agents.

He stressed that the skills OpenAI distilled into its own AI tools ultimately came from the startup’s employees, including that talented sales staffer, Sophie. 

“Find your Sophie,” Huhn said. 

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

881 likes, 219 comments – katiecouric on October 6, 2025: “Paramount Skydance has acquired The Free Press, an online news and commentary outlet branded as an alternative to traditional news organizations, co-founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, alongside her wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss.

The New York Times reports the purchase price was roughly $150 million in cash and Paramount stock. The acquisition is one of Skydance chief David Ellison’s most significant early moves to reshape the news unit at Paramount, which he acquired in a blockbuster $8 billion deal earlier this year.

In seeking federal approval of the merger, Skydance committed that the new company’s programming would have a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum. Skydance also said it would hire a third-party impartial outsider to report to the president of the new company to evaluate complaints of bias.

President Trump sued Paramount last year over a 60 Minutes interview conducted with Kamala Harris, who was running for president at the time, accusing the show of distorting her remarks to present her in a more favorable light. Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle the lawsuit with Trump.

“We are thrilled to welcome Bari and The Free Press to Paramount and CBS News,” Mr. Ellison said in a statement. “Bari is a proven champion of independent, principled journalism, and I am confident her entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision will invigorate CBS News.”

Weiss announced the news in a post on The Free Press site, writing: “I’ll continue to lead this incredible community alongside my tireless team, remaining as CEO and editor-in-chief. But I’ll be taking on another title, too. As of today, I am editor-in-chief of CBS News, working with new colleagues on the programs that have impacted American culture for generations — shows like 60 Minutes and Sunday Morning — and shaping how millions of Americans read, listen, watch, and most importantly, understand the news in the 21st century.”

Weiss has never run a TV network, and in her role as editor-in-chief of CBS News, will have influence over hundreds of producers, anchors, and reporters around the world. What are your thoughts? Let me know below.”.

I’m still stunned by the unprecedented scale of Hamas’ savagery as we remember the October 7 terror attacks two years later.