TL;DR: Elon Musk thinks Optimus will dwarf Tesla’s car business, pushing a massive scale-up for the humanoid robot.
Elon Musk isn’t exactly known for thinking small. He recently projected that Optimus could push Tesla into a ten trillion dollar valuation. That is a wild number. But when you look at their mass production plans, you start to see the vision.
Tesla has a distinct edge here. They already know how to manufacture complex machines at a massive scale. Their cars are essentially robots on wheels. Applying that same factory logic to a humanoid form factor gives them a serious head start over pure research labs.
The challenge now is software. Hardware is hard, but teaching a robot to navigate a messy human environment is the real bottleneck. We’re watching them train Optimus on tasks like folding shirts and walking through offices. It looks clunky sometimes. But the iteration speed is what we really need to watch.