Elon Musk was all smiles during Tesla’s shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas on Thursday, a fact that was surprising given his victory in a 45 billion US dollars Dispute over salary package. But the most interesting part of Musk’s presentation to shareholders came when the Tesla CEO started talking about his plans for the Optimus robot. Because, boy oh boy, it was quite a long list of promises.
“It’s, you know, your companion. It can be in your home, it can kind of look after your kids, it could teach them… be a teacher. It can, you know, do factory work,” Musk said, describing the robot on Thursday.
Musk went on to say that Optimus would be like a personal robot from the war of stars Franchise.
“Who doesn’t want a C3PO, you know? But a C3PO plus R2D2 plus, you know, plus plus. That would be pretty awesome. I think everyone in the world is going to want one. Like, literally everyone,” Musk continued.
Musk first announced Tesla’s Optimus robot back in 2021 when he released a person in a robot costume. And the robot seems to have made some real progress since that initial reveal. The robot can now walk on two legs, for example, which is an achievement considering it was previously an imaginary thing. But the footage released shows that Optimus is still lagging behind key competitors in important paths.
And we say “public footage” because that’s the only way we can judge the robot’s progress, and there was no revolutionary real-world demonstration at Thursday’s meeting. The big advances were all in Musk’s head, communicated as things that will happen in the future — a year from now, two years from now, who knows how many years from now.
The shareholders meeting, which was streamed live on Youtube and X, Musk stressed that his robots would soon make some very important advances. And as you can see from the list of the billionaire’s quotes below, some of them are extremely optimistic.
- “I think we have something like a major hardware overhaul that should be completed by the end of this year or early next year, and then we’ll start limited production of Optimus next year. Limited production for use in our factories.”
- “My prediction is that next year there will be over a thousand, maybe even several thousand Optimus robots working at Tesla.”
And those were still relatively modest predictions. Then Musk started to become bolder.
- “The level of autonomy will be radically better. You will literally be able to talk to it and say, ‘Please do this task’ or ‘I’m going to show you something. Now do what I show you.'”
- “[Optimus will] Get to the point where it can watch a video of something like a person and then just by watching that video, it can learn and do that task.”
- “I’m confident there will be more of them… the ratio of humanoid robots to humans will be greater than one to one. So there will be more than 10 billion humanoid robots in the world. Probably 20 or more… and Tesla will be the leader by far.”
- “It will be able to play the piano. It’s really wow.”
There were many robots that play the pianoof course. The question is whether you can build a robot that plays the piano well. But then Musk made a prediction about Tesla’s value in the future.
- “I agree with ARK Invest’s analysis that autonomous transportation has a market cap of $5 to $7 trillion. With Optimus, I think the market cap is $25, literally $25 trillion.”
You’ll notice that Musk didn’t give an exact date for when he thinks Tesla will reach a $25 trillion market cap. For comparison, Apple’s current market cap is $3.29 trillion.
Will any of Musk’s predictions come true? As always, no one knows the future for sure. Many crazy things can happen, and Musk’s competitors in the automotive sector, such as BMW, are already testing humanoid robots in factories. So we know that some of Musk’s goals are achievable, if only because other companies are already doing it.
However, there is still a long way to go before we see robots taking care of children. At least a long way to go before such a thing can be done responsibly. And that is more or less the crux of the problem when it comes to Musk and his consumer-facing products. The Tesla CEO has been promising autonomous vehicles for so many years, and we have them, so to speak. They are just not something that a responsible person would rely heavily on yet. A case in point is the Tesla driver in Orange County, California, who crashed into a police car on Thursday while reportedly using fully autonomous driving.
Maybe you shouldn’t leave your baby with Optimus just yet, even if Musk eventually finds a way to bring these robots to market.