Elon Musk’s wide-ranging business endeavors are nothing if not prolific in their technology advancements and while his schedule predictions have frequently tracked overly optimistic, he always seems to get there.
Musk, the world’s richest man and currently worth over $250 billion, per Forbes’ real-time billionaires list, owns electric car maker Tesla, space transportation and satellite internet company SpaceX, social media platform X (formerly Twitter), underground tunneling innovator The Boring Co., brain implant startup Neuralink and the recently announced artificial intelligence developer xAI.
While iterations of his humanoid robot project, operating under the Tesla brand, have consistently fallen short of publicized release goals, Musk tweeted Monday that the latest version, the Optimus Gen 2, will be ready for deployment to the factory floors of Tesla plants next year and available for commercial sales in 2026.
“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,” Musk tweeted.
Tesla’s Optimus robot, named after Optimus Prime, the hero robot from the “Transformers” animated series, was first revealed in 2021 at a Tesla AI Day celebration in an announcement that featured a person break dancing in a robot costume. At the same event a year later, the company showed an actual robot that walked on stage and waved to audience members.
The company says the 5′ 8″ robot is designed to perform “boring, repetitious and dangerous” work and is reportedly aiming for pricing of around $20,000 per unit. A video released in May shows the robot at a Tesla manufacturing facility performing tasks, like sorting batteries, on a production line.
Will robots replace human workers?
Robotics have a history intrinsically linked to the world of auto manufacturing and the first practical application of the technology made its debut in Detroit in the early ‘60s when the Unimate robotic arm joined the production line at a General Motors plant. A crude machine by today’s standards, perhaps, but one capable of tirelessly lifting and stacking the heavy die-cast steel components of the day.
The auto industry has gone on to embrace the technology at ever higher scales. A typical assembly line now looks more like a futurescape wrought by science fiction authors than the original “moving assembly line” that Henry Ford deployed in the early 20th century, albeit one that could produce a completed Model T every 90 minutes.
Robotics have since burgeoned far beyond the manufacturing floors of automakers, now numbering in the millions globally and increasingly deployed in a wide range of processes. Marina Bill, president of the International Federation of Robotics, noted in a recent report that robot “density” hit an all-time high of 151 robots per 10,000 workers in 2022, more than doubling the figure of just six years ago. In the United States, the ratio is even higher, with 285 robots per 10,000 employees and a robot density ranking 10th in the world.
Along with the proliferation of ever more advanced robotics and manufacturing automation have come fears that the innovations will replace human workers. Fast-advancing artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, the “brains” that drive many robotic processes, have only fanned the flames of those concerns. In an interview last year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicted that AI-powered humanoid robots were on track to become more affordable than human laborers and will begin replacing blue-collar workers.