Elon Musk Announces Launch Date for Human-Like Robots
Named Optimus, the robot is about 1.7 meters tall and weighs 56 kg.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced that the company plans to produce humanoid robots for its factories starting next year. Musk shared on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that he hopes to expand into "high production" mode by 2026, making the robots available for other companies.
Named Optimus, the robot is about 1.7 meters tall and weighs 56 kg. It is designed to perform boring, repetitious, and dangerous tasks. The name references Optimus Prime from the Transformers franchise.
Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2024
Musk first introduced the concept of Optimus at Tesla AI Day in 2021, where an actor in a bodysuit performed a dance routine. At a subsequent AI Day in 2022, a prototype robot walked on stage and waved to the audience, with a video showing it carrying a box, watering plants, and moving metal bars in a Tesla factory.
Musk has expressed his aim for the robots to be mass-produced and cost less than $20,000 each.
In June, Tesla shareholders approved a record-breaking pay package for CEO Elon Musk, valued at more than $47 billion. This package, composed of 303 million stock options, was initially dismissed by a Delaware judge earlier this year due to flaws in the approval process.
Recently, Elon Musk decided to dismiss the lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Sued in the California state court, the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice on June 11th, the day after Musk openly denounced OpenAI’s new collaboration with Apple.