For years — through its pandemic-fueled highs and its post-quarantine malaise — Peloton has held its earnings calls at a bright and bushy 8:30AM ET. Not yesterday. Instead, the company broke different news first thing in the morning: it issued yet another recall for 833,000 of its original Bike Plus units, before posting its Q1 2026 results after the markets closed at 4 o’clock.
Peloton CEO Peter Stern addressed the recall right away during the company’s earnings call, stating the facts — that there were only three reports of breakages and two injuries, plus the company was offering a free replacement seat. Later, when asked in an Q&A with analysts, Stern said that the recall’s impact “is expected to be immaterial and is reflected in our full-year guidance.”
In fairness, the scale of this one is smaller than the company’s first seat post recall in 2023, which affected over 2 million original Peloton Bikes with 35 reports of breakages and 13 injuries. But nevertheless, it still cast a shadow over what was otherwise a positive earnings call for the company. Peloton surprised investors by beating expectations with a second consecutive profitable quarter and a bullish forecast for the holiday season. Shares closed up 14 percent today.
But that’s sort of Peloton’s thing. It does something promising — good, even. And then Mr. Big dies. Maybe it launches an insensitive holiday commercial. Prices get hiked and its diehard fans feel nickel and dimed. It announces yet another recall. Or another round of layoffs after vowing layoffs were done. Either way, the Peloton story has become a constant push-pull between progress and the company shooting itself in the foot.
All of this makes it hard to say what Peloton’s future looks like. On the one hand, executives seem confident that the recent ambitious hardware refresh and foray into AI-powered fitness features is going to help the company pedal its way back to the glory days. (If they weren’t, it’d be even more audacious to price the Tread Plus at close to $7,000.) On the other hand, Peloton fans seem divided.
The new products, announced on October 1, triggered intense emotions in subreddits and the official Peloton Facebook group. Many long-time users are irked that there’s no trade-in program or upgrade kits for the bike’s new display. It feels doubly egregious when the new hardware is essentially the same machine with a new tablet affixed to it. You don’t have to dig too deep for the Peloton defenders, but it’s hard to categorize the announcement as a “solid win” within the community. And if that’s how the long-time diehards feel, where exactly is Peloton getting its confidence from?
The longer trend has been a slow and gradual trek toward recovery. Since former CEO John Foley stepped down, there’s been exponentially fewer gaffes, petulant patent fights, and overall drama. One could argue that it took subsequent CEO Barry McCarthy’s roughly two-year reign (and a baffling ship metaphor) to staunch the bleeding. Stern, the current CEO, has signaled that his strategy is to focus on restoring profitability, improving cash flow, and zeroing in on efficiency so the beleaguered company can think about growth again.
It’s frankly boring. Whereas McCarthy — like his predecessor Foley — could be counted on to say something out of pocket here and there, Stern has been about as enthusiastically bland as a CEO can be. (He ended yesterday’s call with a corny joke about a “veritable buffet” of new content for Thanksgiving.) Perhaps that’s what Peloton has needed all along: to have adults at the helm so that the company can be boring for once.
Because that’s always been the most baffling part of the Peloton story. The company has consistently had a winning formula of a good product and a loyal subscriber base. That it fell as fast and hard as it did was, despite the end of pandemic lockdowns, because Peloton couldn’t get out of its own way. Given the timing of yesterday’s recall and earnings call, I don’t think Peloton’s quite ready to fully give up its dramatic flourish just yet. But for fans and investors alike, a day where Peloton headlines don’t automatically induce anxiety would be a relief indeed.
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![Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual OrientationThe US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.”This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.“If we don’t know certain things, we can’t challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don’t know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s some massive inequality.’”Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.”Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration. The data from the census inform everything from the apportionment of congressional seats to federal funding that is allocated based on the size of a population.An employee at the Department of Health and Human Services, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that “many HHS programs use Census data to appropriate funding. Removing undocumented individuals from the census will cause localities with high numbers of those populations to lose critical federal funding.”The employee says that removal of racial categories could specifically impact Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding. “Some programs use the ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities,” they say.#Census #Proposal #Stop #Counting #Undocumented #Immigrantsand #Ignore #Race #Sexual #Orientationus census,immigration,undocumented immigrants,race,lgbtq+](https://i0.wp.com/media.wired.com/photos/6a7630b55d2ebc1c5247b509/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/GettyImages-157580450-edited.jpg?ssl=1 "Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual OrientationThe US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.”This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.“If we don’t know certain things, we can’t challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don’t know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s some massive inequality.’”Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.”Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration. The data from the census inform everything from the apportionment of congressional seats to federal funding that is allocated based on the size of a population.An employee at the Department of Health and Human Services, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that “many HHS programs use Census data to appropriate funding. Removing undocumented individuals from the census will cause localities with high numbers of those populations to lose critical federal funding.”The employee says that removal of racial categories could specifically impact Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding. “Some programs use the ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities,” they say.#Census #Proposal #Stop #Counting #Undocumented #Immigrantsand #Ignore #Race #Sexual #Orientationus census,immigration,undocumented immigrants,race,lgbtq+")
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