Musk's Pathetic Robot Is Looking More And More Like Bad Vapourware

The Wizard of Oz is wearing the Emperor's New Clothes.

Tesla Optimus — Tesla

If one thing has characterised Elon Musk’s career, it has been illusion. From faking a supercomputer to hooking in his first investors to simulating self-driving car demos, the hype that drives Musk’s wealth and power does not come from material results but from the illusion of progress. However, Musk is not a very skilled magician, and the illusion breaks every now and then. Occasionally, we get a glimpse into how phony this empire of speculation is — just look at the non-existent new Roadster, the easily shatterable windows of the Cybertruck, and even the hilarious failure of the Hyperloop. Last weekend, the illusion was broken yet again when, at Tesla’s Miami ‘Autonomy Visualised’ event, one of Tesla’s robots took a very suspicious fall, which made it look less like a cutting-edge robot and more like a decade-old Disney animatronic. The implications of this are nothing short of devastating for Tesla.

Before we get into this hilarious incident, we first need to understand what Musk claims this robot will do.

In short, Musk wants this robot to completely transform the economy. He, in all seriousness, expects to sell a million of them a year by 2030, with a billion sold per year following shortly thereafter. Musk has claimed these robots can replace most forms of labour and will have 5x the productivity of a human per year, and that this will create a “sustainable abundance”. He estimates that soon these robots will account for 80% of Tesla’s overall value and that they could generate $10 trillion in long-term revenue.

He has also called Optimus Tesla’s “most important product ever”, but he said the same thing about the Cybertruck, so go figure. Let’s also be clear here: infinite abundant growth within a finite system is the definition of cancer. Just a little food for thought.

So, do you want to see just how incredible these robots are after four years of development? Well, take a look at the video below, taken at the recent Miami event:

https://x.com/cixliv/status/1997878834956525898?s=20

(Substack sometimes embeds the tweet, if not then there should be a link above)

Notice how it looks like the robot knocks everything over, takes off a nonexistent VR headset, and then goes so rigid it falls backwards? Yeah, this looks exactly like the bot was being remotely puppeteered, the operator forgot the shutdown sequence, and began to remove the VR headset before control had been totally severed, causing it to grab at a nonexistent headset and lose its balance. Indeed, I can’t think of a single other reason this robot could have acted like this.

So, it’s less like a real-life autonomous C-3PO and more of a Muppet with an underpaid intern’s arm up its arse. This kind of non-autonomous VR control also isn’t new, with Da Vinci Systems pioneering its use in medical robots in the ’90s and Honda’s ASIMO putting it in a humanoid form factor in the early 2000s.