BENGALURU: You may soon be able to buy an
autonomous
humanoid robot that can
babysit
your kids after it’s done cleaning your home, all for the price of a low-end electric car, that’s the future Elon
Musk
painted at Tesla’s 2024 annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas last week.
Musk said Tesla’s Optimus robot, first announced in 2021, is a humanoid robot that is intended to be able to do anything you want it to do.
“It can be your companion. It can be at your house; it can sort of babysit your kids and teach them. It can do factory stuff.”
Musk also said that Tesla is already using Optimus
robots
in the production of its electric cars. “We have two Optimus robots in our Fremont factory that are doing basically…taking cells off the end of the line and placing them in a shipping container. We actually have quite a few of these cruising around our offices in Palo Alto,” he said.
The billionaire did a little jig as he came on stage with many shareholders rising to their feet and shouting ‘Musk, Musk’. Every major pronouncement by him was met with loud applause, drowning out criticism by some of Musk’s huge pay package that came up for voting.
Musk predicted that everyone in the world is going to want the AI-powered humanoid robots when they release, and that the demand could push Tesla’s valuation to $25 trillion. “I think we could make one for a cost, at a really high scale, of about $10,000. It’d be less expensive than a car. And I think if you sell it for $20,000 or something, this is at large-scale volume, Tesla would basically make about a trillion dollars of profit a year from that.” Though no exact release dates were given, Musk did say they plan to move into limited production by the end of next year and that thousands of these robots could be working at Tesla’s factories by then.
Aside from robots, Musk was also bullish on fully unsupervised autonomous vehicles and claimed that autonomous driving technology is maturing so fast that car owners of the future may be able to send their cars out to work for them.
“It’s actually a combination of Airbnb and Uber to some degree, so there’ll be some cars that Tesla owns itself, kind of like an Uber fashion, but then for the fleet that is owned by our customers, it will be like an Airbnb thing where you can add or subtract your car to the fleet whenever you want. So, in case you’re going away for a week, at just one tap on your Tesla app, your car gets added to the fleet and it just makes money for you while you’re gone,” he said.
English (US) ·