Elon Musk's Optimus Robot Collapses in a Hilariously Suspicious Way
The Hilarious Fall of Tesla's Optimus Robot
Tesla held a special pop-up event over the weekend for Art Basel Miami Beach, the international art fair in Florida. The pop-up, dubbed "The Future of Autonomy Visualized," featured Elon Musk's Cybercab prototype and Optimus robots. However, a video from the event is going viral for all the wrong reasons, and it's pretty hilarious.
The video, which appears to have first been posted to r/teslamotors on Reddit, shows an Optimus robot knocking over several bottles of water on a table before lifting its arms into the air. The arms move in ways that would be consistent with taking off a VR headset, and then they fall heavily, with one hitting a water bottle that seems to explode and shoot water everywhere. After that, Optimus appears to go lifeless and falls backward.
The Teleoperation Mystery
Many people online speculate that an unseen person was controlling the Optimus robot, and that person took off their headset before disconnecting. This kind of robotic control is called teleoperation, and it has been in existence since at least the 1940s. Sometimes called a Waldo, Walt Disney showed off how he made the 1964 New York World's Fair attraction Carousel of Progress with a similar technology.
Musk's Previous Missteps
This isn't the first time Musk has been caught stretching the truth about his Optimus robot's capabilities. Back in January 2024, Musk posted a video showing Optimus folding a shirt. However, some eagle-eyed social media users started asking why we could see what appeared to be a hand coming briefly into frame in the lower-right corner. The hand seemed to match up perfectly with what Optimus was doing.
The Miami Event
Another video from the Miami event shows an Optimus robot handing out water. After the person filming grabs their water, they hand it back to Optimus. The person wants Optimus to set down the water, presumably to see it do more movements. But Optimus is initially reluctant to do so. It's unclear why, but it might have something to do with the video that's currently going viral. It seems likely that the operator may struggle to see below them, and setting the water back down on the table could cause them to knock things over.
The Future of Autonomy
Building autonomous robots that can work without human intervention is incredibly difficult. But there are companies like Figure that are miles ahead of Tesla when it comes to this kind of autonomy. Musk has bet the future of Tesla on AI and humanoid robots, and he famously promised that his robots would one day be babysitting your kids. However, if we're nearly two years out from the fake laundry-folding video and Optimus still can't hand out a bottle of water autonomously, it makes you wonder how quickly he can deliver humanoid robots to the masses.
