Boston Dynamics is such a hyped company, yet it constantly gets shoveled from one mega corp to another...Does it mean none of those companies see a profitable future with it?
Good for him, I think.
The main point is that profitability is probably not the issue why BD is switching owners so often. Some of these owners did not need the cashflow from the sale in the first place.
since softbank though, marc has transitioned to a chairman role, and the company has put in a lot of work into commercialization. i suspect they are still mostly R&D focused, but they are focusing more on commercialization than they ever have before in their history.
And generally, it got passed around because there is valuable research IP that belongs to the company, which given the right market can be valuable, so in the spirit of capitalizing on it if that market realizes, companies either jump on it, or preemptively buy it for a later sale (which is no doubt what Softbank did)
Their new pivot towards wheeled logistic robots is acknowledgement of this fact. They still try to push probably unnecessary "legs with wheels" with Handle.
What robot revolution needs is nimble hands.
My guess would be that Hyundai's product development organizations, in theory, can take Boston Dynamic's technology and integrate it into products that can be sold commercially. As an automobile and robotics[0] manufacturer, Hyundai actually has a better chance than Google or SoftBank since they know a fair amount about manufacturing machines.