Elon Musk seems to think Optimus will be a hit and claimed it will claim much of Tesla’s stock value.
Tesla’s Cybercab launch last year is one of those tech events that will live in infamy. Alongside his titular vehicle (which has no steering wheel), DOGE billionaire Elon Musk showed off the latest iteration of Tesla’s Optimus robot, a humanoid droid meant to do . well, it’s unclear. Tesla says it will do tasks humans find boring and repetitive. Although dozens of the things were walking around at the Cybercab event, they were later discovered to be remote controlled, meaning the one thing Tesla had accomplished was making a robot that doesn’t fall over while walking.
Musk seems to think Optimus will be a massive hit with consumers, and claimed in September that it will account for 80% of Tesla’s stock value. He provided no time frame, so we can only assume it will happen sometime in between Tesla full self-driving and porcine aviation. Optimus will have steep competition if it does come to market, with products like XPENG’s dystopian-looking humanoid robot, Iron, as well as the controversial 1x NEO humanoid that also needs to be remotely controlled. Leaders in the field aren’t giving Musk the benefit of doubt, either. The iRobot co-founder and MIT professor emeritus of robotics Rodney Brooks called Optimus «pure fantasy thinking» in a fiery September blog screed.
Brooks is one of the brains behind the iRobot Roomba robot vacuum and the former director of the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has served as a thesis advisor for 27 robotics PhDs. It’s hard to find a more seasoned expert in the field. Here’s why he says Tesla — and any other company building human-shaped robots — is approaching the field of robotics from a flawed perspective.
