Elon Musk just took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and announced that Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot will be sold to the public by the end of next year. Musk is the master of unrealistic timetables, but this may be the nuttiest one yet. These are humanoid robots that are supposed to be able to do just about any task a human can do.
Musk, as usual, gave himself an out if the robots don’t start rolling off the assembly line in 2027, saying that they’ll only be released when Tesla is “confident that it’s very high reliability, very high safety and the range of functionality is also very high.”
He stated that the robots have already begun doing simple tasks in the Tesla factory, but there’s no proof of this other than his word. In the real world, Optimus robots have continuously failed to live up to the marketing hype.
If there was any question that Optimus uses teleop for their robots. Here one clearly has a guy take the headset off and it falls over.
Absolutely hilarious though. pic.twitter.com/4gYVohjY00
— CIX (@cixliv) December 8, 2025
There have been plenty of reports suggesting that previous demos of the robots in action were actually smoke and mirrors, as they were being remotely piloted by human operators.
Tesla’s stock jumped over three percent upon this announcement because company investors live in a world of magical rainbows, unicorns and robots mixing drinks at home in the year 2027. Musk also recently stated that the robots would be ready for commercial deployment in 2026. That’s this year. It’s worth noting that the program head for the project, Milan Kovac, recently left the company.
Again, these are autonomous robots that are supposed to be able to perform complex tasks across a wide variety of categories. That’ll likely happen someday, but not by 2027. I’m just gonna go ahead and throw Musk’s timeline in with “two years to AGI” and “five years until the singularity.”
On a related note, the Tesla CEO also said that the long-awaited Cybercab will enter production in April, with a goal of two million vehicles manufactured each year. This isn’t quite as far-fetched as the Optimus promise, but that two million number seems highly suspect. Just how many consumers does he think want a car without a steering wheel that only holds two people?
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/elon-musk-just-told-davos-that-tesla-will-sell-humanoid-robots-next-year-really-he-swears-192515568.html?src=rss
