Musk: ~80% of Tesla [future] value will be Optimus Robots

[NY_Rob]

Agreed. Any time these billionaire tech bros tell us their heartfelt visions for the future, red flags and flashing warning lights should go off.

Well they all basically just want a perpetually running machine that prints out $$$$ with no human employees involved and no day-to-day human intervention needed. As we know, neither none of them give a rat's ass about their human employees.

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[COdogman]

Well they all basically just want a perpetually running machine that prints out $$$$ with no human employees involved and no day-to-day human intervention needed. As we know, neither none of them give a rat's ass about their human employees.

Exactly. Yet these geniuses keep failing at that while the AI industry as a whole has no true path to profitability....
https://futurism.com/ai-far-away-profit-experts-warn

 

[Budman]

You are so out of touch. Examples
- Drones have limitations to deliver packages. A humanoid robot can solve this problem, especially when those vans full self drive. Amazon would buy a tonne of these things. Both the bots and the FSD technology. Even now with a human operator. How many times does a delivery van stop and the driver walks to one side of the residential street and then the other side of the street with a second package for another home. Imagine the driver hands one package to the bot to do one of those deliveries. You just cut down delivery times in half and increased productivity. This, times tens of thousands of delivery vehicles!
-Imagine in a nursing home with hundreds of beds who's sheets need changing quite often. There is hundreds of man hours of labor simply running soiled sheets to the end of the hall and dropped in the laundry shute for washing. PSW's can simply hand the sheets to a bot to do such a simple task An easy one but it's still time, 2 minutes there and back times 1000-'s and 1000's of trip throughout the year all ads up and a bot can quickly make a business case to pay itself back. Or things like just carrying a dinner tray to a patients room, or cafeteria table. Again, x100's throughout the day. There are all kinds of menial tasks that a bot can do in just this one environment and a minute here and minute there all ads up to real $$$$ paid to a human year after year.
-As you and I get older imagine having a bot on hand for all kinds of menial tasks in the home. Please provide a steady arm to hold while I step in or out of the shower, pass me a towel, Lift my groceries up on the counter, get me a drink from the fridge, carry my bag to the car and put it in the trunk while I get in the car. Or if you have elderly parents. You know how much a psw costs to go in the home to help out and keep a watchful eye on your elderly early dementia parents.
We take these things for granted now but when people are 90 and would like to be in their homes a few more years before finally being shipped off to a nursing home you'd gladly pay $25k for and extra helping hand. This x1,000,000's of elderly people!
There are endless examples of menial things a bot can do. and every industry in the world will use then.

I believe you misunderstood what I said.
Robots are very useful Putting them in humanoid form with over 100 degrees of freedom when a much simpler form factor with 10 or so degrees of freedom can do the job seems like a better solution with a much higher likelihood of success at a far lower cost.

 

[Motoarzon]

I believe you misunderstood what I said.
Robots are very useful Putting them in humanoid form with over 100 degrees of freedom when a much simpler form factor with 10 or so degrees of freedom can do the job seems like a better solution with a much higher likelihood of success at a far lower cost.

I agree. I worked in the automation industry for 23yrs and robots do amazing things. But limited axis's means limited purpose built tasks. If the goal is to automate potentially all the other things that humans do then a robot would have to have the same range of motion and form factor as humans. Add in electronic eyes, audio input, speech output, sense of touch (torque feedback from it's 40 actuator motors) and an AI brain and you really have a robot to do almost anything a human can do. Tesla has a target price of around $25k which really isn't expensive.

 

[140 degrees]

You are so out of touch. Examples
- Drones have limitations to deliver packages. A humanoid robot can solve this problem, especially when those vans full self drive. Amazon would buy a tonne of these things. Both the bots and the FSD technology. Even now with a human operator. How many times does a delivery van stop and the driver walks to one side of the residential street and then the other side of the street with a second package for another home. Imagine the driver hands one package to the bot to do one of those deliveries. You just cut down delivery times in half and increased productivity. This, times tens of thousands of delivery vehicles!
-Imagine in a nursing home with hundreds of beds who's sheets need changing quite often. There is hundreds of man hours of labor simply running soiled sheets to the end of the hall and dropped in the laundry shute for washing. PSW's can simply hand the sheets to a bot to do such a simple task An easy one but it's still time, 2 minutes there and back times 1000-'s and 1000's of trip throughout the year all ads up and a bot can quickly make a business case to pay itself back. Or things like just carrying a dinner tray to a patients room, or cafeteria table. Again, x100's throughout the day. There are all kinds of menial tasks that a bot can do in just this one environment and a minute here and minute there all ads up to real $$$$ paid to a human year after year.
-As you and I get older imagine having a bot on hand for all kinds of menial tasks in the home. Please provide a steady arm to hold while I step in or out of the shower, pass me a towel, Lift my groceries up on the counter, get me a drink from the fridge, carry my bag to the car and put it in the trunk while I get in the car. Or if you have elderly parents. You know how much a psw costs to go in the home to help out and keep a watchful eye on your elderly early dementia parents.
We take these things for granted now but when people are 90 and would like to be in their homes a few more years before finally being shipped off to a nursing home you'd gladly pay $25k for and extra helping hand. This x1,000,000's of elderly people!
There are endless examples of menial things a bot can do. and every industry in the world will use then.

Your first two examples don't require a humanoid robot. An enhanced version of the material handling robots that are widely used in factories and warehouses will do the job at a fraction of the cost. It's feasible in the near future.

Help around the home could be interesting, but NO ROBOT CONTROLLED BY GROK OR ELON WILL CROSS MY THRESHOLD. Consider all of the privacy and financial risks involved with a mobile camera and microphone platform embedded in your home, if is accessible to an untrusted entity. Sounds like Orwell's nightmare.

 

[Motoarzon]

Your first two examples don't require a humanoid robot. An enhanced version of the material handling robots that are widely used in factories and warehouses will do the job at a fraction of the cost. It's feasible in the near future.

Help around the home could be interesting, but NO ROBOT CONTROLLED BY GROK OR ELON WILL CROSS MY THRESHOLD. Consider all of the privacy and financial risks involved with a mobile camera and microphone platform embedded in your home, if is accessible to an untrusted entity. Sounds like Orwell's nightmare.

I agree that if an application can be solved with an existing less expensive simple robot solution already in place then go for it.
But let me ask you this? Can an enhanced version of an existing material handling robot in a factory deliver a package to an apartment? Can it walk up steps? have eyes to find an elevator, push a button to summon elevator, drop package at door on the 10th floor, and do it at the moving speed close to a human. And after doing all that can it also navigate the millions of other variable addresses and obstacles? Can that same single model robot do millions of other tasks in other industries an environments around the world?

I don't think cameras and microphones in the home are going to be a problem, they are already in your home for the past decades on the phones you carry around and using security systems that you personally have already agreed to and have accepted.

One think for sure is lots of companies are pursuing this and it's going to happen. They aren't all spending hundreds of millions in research and development if they didn't think there was a business case.

 

[Biturbowned]

Bought some more TSLQ.

 

[Motoarzon]

Bought some more TSLQ.

Ahh, the Tesla Short ETF. I don't get it unless it's just a very short term play for the next couple months. Because the trend on this one is down, the trend of the 2x bull's are up.

 

[NC-Rivian]

My thing for Scarlett Johansson has surpassed wee by a wee bit.

So …. Would that be … you going wee wee.?!

 

[therealcmj]

Can an enhanced version of an existing material handling robot in a factory deliver a package to an apartment? Can it walk up steps? have eyes to find an elevator, push a button to summon elevator, drop package at door on the 10th floor, and do it at the moving speed close to a human. And after doing all that can it also navigate the millions of other variable addresses and obstacles? Can that same single model robot do millions of other tasks in other industries an environments around the world?

This is a dumb ask.

First of all a 10th story apartment is Ada accessible. Very likely has doorman/security desk. And an elevator. And a policy about what/who are allowed in. Heck, most buildings of that size have packages rooms to accept deliveries because they don’t want packages piled up outside apartment doors.

And a delivery bot on wheels can do that delivery at least as quickly, safer, and at far less cost than the far more complicated humanoid robot.

 

[Budman]

You are so out of touch. Examples
- Drones have limitations to deliver packages. A humanoid robot can solve this problem, especially when those vans full self drive. Amazon would buy a tonne of these things. Both the bots and the FSD technology. Even now with a human operator. How many times does a delivery van stop and the driver walks to one side of the residential street and then the other side of the street with a second package for another home. Imagine the driver hands one package to the bot to do one of those deliveries. You just cut down delivery times in half and increased productivity. This, times tens of thousands of delivery vehicles!
-Imagine in a nursing home with hundreds of beds who's sheets need changing quite often. There is hundreds of man hours of labor simply running soiled sheets to the end of the hall and dropped in the laundry shute for washing. PSW's can simply hand the sheets to a bot to do such a simple task An easy one but it's still time, 2 minutes there and back times 1000-'s and 1000's of trip throughout the year all ads up and a bot can quickly make a business case to pay itself back. Or things like just carrying a dinner tray to a patients room, or cafeteria table. Again, x100's throughout the day. There are all kinds of menial tasks that a bot can do in just this one environment and a minute here and minute there all ads up to real $$$$ paid to a human year after year.
-As you and I get older imagine having a bot on hand for all kinds of menial tasks in the home. Please provide a steady arm to hold while I step in or out of the shower, pass me a towel, Lift my groceries up on the counter, get me a drink from the fridge, carry my bag to the car and put it in the trunk while I get in the car. Or if you have elderly parents. You know how much a psw costs to go in the home to help out and keep a watchful eye on your elderly early dementia parents.
We take these things for granted now but when people are 90 and would like to be in their homes a few more years before finally being shipped off to a nursing home you'd gladly pay $25k for and extra helping hand. This x1,000,000's of elderly people!
There are endless examples of menial things a bot can do. and every industry in the world will use then.

I've expressed my deep skepticism of humanoid robots here a few times. I think RJ has articulated those sentiments better than I can here in this article about the Rivian spin off, MIND ROBOTICS. My opinion of him as a CEO continues to increase.

Below is a couple of paragraphs in particular that stood out to me: (I added the bold font as my emphasis)

I think what’s missed in industrial [robotics] and this is one of the things we really see clearly, is the work happens with the hands. So, the hands are very, very important. Everything else, from a robotic system point of view, is to get the hands to the right place. And so the ability for the robots to do really complex motions, like, let’s say, like a back flip that’s actually just means the robot has a lot of unnecessary complexity in it for the vast majority of tasks.

And I understand the purpose of showing that is to show the flexibility and capability (of the humanoid robots). But if you were to go into a Rivian facility, you will see very few people that have the type of flexibility that would enable them to do a back flip. And so it’s just when you think about deploying at scale, you want to minimize the complexity, minimize the number of failure modes, reduce power consumption.

And so I do think many of the robotic systems, particularly humanoid systems, that are being thought about for manufacturing are way too complex relative to what they do. They’re going to be human like, they’ll have hands, there’s a perception model at the top. There’s going to be the ability to adjust and X, Y and Z; there’s going to be locomotion to allow it to move. But I think, mimicking human biomechanics in a manufacturing environment misses some of the fundamental points of manufacturing, which is, it’s all hand based.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/15/rivians-rj-scaringe-thinks-were-doing-robots-all-wrong/

 

[Rivianready]

I agree that Tesla increasingly looks unfocused. Today, roughly 80–85% of its revenue still comes from EV sales, with software (FSD) contributing about 5–10% and energy (battery storage) around 10%. Meanwhile, robotaxis and robotics generate essentially zero revenue. In other words, the entire business is still being funded by EVs—yet Tesla appears to be shifting its attention away from them.

Operationally, Tesla has become a two-product company, heavily reliant on the Model Y and Model 3. The Model S and X are expected to be discontinued in 2026, and the Cybertruck has yet to prove itself as a meaningful commercial success. While the Model 3 and Y have been refreshed, there is no clear pipeline of new mass-market vehicles to sustain growth.

At the same time, competition is intensifying. Companies like Rivian (R2), BYD, NIO, Hyundai, and traditional automakers are bringing compelling, often lower-cost alternatives to market. Tesla’s early lead in EVs is narrowing.

Against this backdrop, Tesla is increasingly positioning its future around robotaxis and humanoid robotics—two areas that remain unproven, both technically and commercially. These may ultimately become transformative businesses, but today they are still speculative.

The core question is strategic:

If Tesla diverts too much capital and focus toward these uncertain future bets, does it risk undermining the very EV business that currently funds everything? In other words, is it in danger of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?

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