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Tesla claims to be pivoting away from cars in favour of producing their Optimus robots. And SpaceX's IPO valuation appears to be predicated on them being an AI datacentre company.

So I guess the "Musk plays 4d chess" view would be that there are obvious synergies between humanoid robots and AI.

Ugh. Honestly, that makes it seem worse than the purely cynical financial engineering takes.



Tesla has a problem. Its sky-high valuation is based on the potential upside from “visionary” sci-fi future programs. However, the narratives are losing credibility.

Once upon a time, Robotaxi and Optimus sounded like visionary futuristic ideas. However:

We now live in a world where Waymo exists, and autonomous taxi hasn’t proven to be as socially transformative as promised. No huge latent market exposed. Aslo, Tesla is lagging behind.

We now live in the world where Unitree exists, and is shipping! Again, Tesla is on the back foot. The technology no longer seems quite so futuristic. Disruptors usually disrupt from down-market— that puts BYD cars and Unitree robots in the better position.

With a merger, the joint sci-fi future proposition is colonies on Mars. That one is likely to stay in the future for a long time. From a stock valuation point of view, the goal is for the promise to be forever in the future. That way, the investor thinks the upside is still to come. Once the promise is delivered, it’s time to cash out.


> autonomous taxi hasn’t proven to be as socially transformative as promise

That's because they are still super expensive - more expensive than Uber!

That's probably partly because the technology is very expensive, but also because they have no competition. Both of those will eventually change.


Fantastic write up. To what degree is all of capitalism actually built on this premise? Why can't I buy the same damn running shoes I bought in 2015? Why can't I buy a dumb TV?


But why are robots and LLMs connected? The only reason why a robot feels more connected to AI than a self driving car is science fiction.


Yeah, it's all scifi posturing. Same with the "Optimus will begin colonising Mars in 2026" line that they were still pushing just a few months ago.

There's perhaps a chance that some part of it might happen someday, but right now the main thing is to distract attention from Tesla's lack of model development and SpaceX's much-vaunted AI business being based on reselling datacentre space at a loss.


For what it's worth they aren't reselling at a loss but rather at an eye watering profit [0].

[0] This assumes Anthropic and Google actually keep paying for at least 1 year of the signed 3, since they can cancel their contracts easily.


Most SOTA humanoid robots use transformers, which are also at the core of LLMs. They also use NVIDIA GPUs for simulation training.


If they are useful for humanoid robots, why aren't they useful for self driving cars, which are just robots of a different shape?




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