Elon Musk bets Tesla on Optimus, says over 1,000 robots working in factories next year

Elon Musk is betting Tesla on its Optimus program, which he now says will add tens of trillion of dollars to its valuation.

He added that Tesla should have over 1,000 humanoid robots working in its factories next year, but he is delaying a recently shared timeline.

Musk started out Tesla’s shareholder meeting with a rant about how he believes that Tesla will be worth “10x more than the currently most valuable companies”, which are worth about $3 trillion.

He built on previous grandiose statements about believing that Optimus is going to be Tesla’s most important product.

The CEO now added that he sees the market for humanoid robots to be about 1 billion units per year and he believes Tesla should capture “at least 10% of it”.

Musk said that he sees Tesla building robots at a volume for about $10,000 a unit and selling them for $20,000, resulting in a $1 trillion profit.

Tesla recently announced that it has “2 Optimus robots working autonomously in its factory” and Musk recently said that he sees Tesla selling robots to customers next year.

Now, at the shareholders meeting, the CEO announced that he expects Tesla to have “a thousand to a couple thousand robots working in its factories next year.”

He said that it would be in limited production, but he didn’t mention customer deliveries.

Finally, the CEO did say that he belives that by 2026, Optimus is going to be a fully software customizable robot.

Electrek’s Take

That sounds nice, but the guy said the same thing on a slightly smaller scale about self-driving for the past 8 years.

I do believe that Tesla has some great advantages in building humanoid robots, especially when it comes to compute power efficiency, and real-world AI experience – though I do think that Tesla is way behind what Elon is claiming. History has proven me right on that… until it doesn’t.

But it’s hard to give him credibility these days. I wish it would take a few pages from Apple’s playbook and shut up about the products until they are ready.