Ford

Eight marquee Michigan subsidy deals promised 20,595 jobs for $2.7B in incentives. Actual spend: $1.8B. Actual jobs: 602 — roughly $3 million apiece. Ford's $210M deal has created zero so far; a $261M SanDisk site is 'a big empty field.'

A Xoogler argued the headline cheats: tax abatements aren't 'spending,' since no business means no revenue either way. A VC fired back that this case was actual cash transfers — which makes it worse, not better.

Ford's own engineering VP put it plainly: "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product." Bloomberg frames it as the machines failing to replace experience.

But the thread caught two asterisks: the systems in question were old-school vision CNNs, not chatbots, and nothing actually proves Ford laid off the 350 people it "rehired."