Elon Musk is at Tesla in his Optimus program, which he says will boost tens of billions of dollars to his valuation.
He added that Tesla is expected to have more than 1,000 humanoid robots running in its factories next year, which is delaying a recently shared schedule.
Musk kicked off Tesla’s shareholder meeting by explaining that he believes Tesla will be worth “10 times more than the highest-value companies lately,” which are worth around $3 trillion.
He relied on previous bombastic statements that he thought Optimus would be Tesla’s ultimate product.
The CEO added that he estimates the market for humanoid robots would be around one billion units per year and that he believes Tesla captures “at least 10% of them. “
Musk said he sees Tesla’s construction robots at a volume of around $10,000 per unit and selling them for $20,000, which would generate a $1 trillion profit.
Tesla recently announced that it has “2 Optimus robots operating autonomously in its factory” and Musk recently said that he sees Tesla promoting robots to its consumers next year.
Today, at the shareholders’ meeting, the CEO announced that he expects Tesla to have “between a thousand and a few thousand robots running in its factories next year. “
He said it would be limited production, but did not mention deliveries to customers.
Robots are already everywhere. One washes dishes, another mows the lawn, and a third vacuums and cleans the floor. But just like in industry, they are committed machines, highly optimized to perform a specific task successfully and cost-effectively. I’m still not convinced that there’s a vast market for confusing robots capable of doing anything wrong. To me, humanoid robots in the factory make no more sense than a hand washing dishes or pushing a lawnmower across my lawn. This is not progress, it is rather the opposite, the most complicated, inefficient, and error-prone way imaginable to perform undeniable, repetitive work. But even if I’m wrong, I don’t see Tesla having any merit here.
Finally, the CEO said that he believes that by 2026 Optimus will be a customizable robot through software.
Sounds good, but the guy has said the same thing on a smaller scale about autonomous driving for the last 8 years.
I think Tesla has wonderful benefits in building humanoid robots, especially when it comes to the computational power and delight of real-world AI, although I think Tesla is very much what Elon claims. History has proven me right on this point. . . until it is no longer the case.
But it is difficult to give it credibility these days. I’d like you to take a few pages out of Apple’s manual and dig deeper into the products until they’re ready.
Fred is Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editor at Electrek.
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