The $500,000 robot servant Elon Musk claims will sell 10 billion units by 2040 can barely walk and struggles with questions like ‘where can I get a coke?’

2025-09-07 15:14:00
www.pcgamer.com

The future is here, but don’t expect much from it. The latest video of Tesla’s “Optimus” robot, which is supposed to be a pillar of the company’s future, shows the robot struggling to do anything for almost a minute straight.

The video was posted on X (formerly Twitter) last week by Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce who recently boasted about replacing 4,000 “heads” (employees) with AI, calling it the “Agentforce.” Benioff gifted that same awkward term to Musk’s robot in his tweet.

Elon’s Tesla Optimus is here! Dawn of the physical Agentforce revolution, tackling human work for $200K–$500K. Productivity game-changer! Congrats @elonmusk, and thank you for always being so kind to me! #Tesla #Optimus pic.twitter.com/bA5IYIylE1September 3, 2025

“Elon’s Tesla Optimus is here,” Benioff wrote. “Dawn of the physical Agentforce revolution, tackling human work for $200K–$500K. Productivity game-changer! Congrats [Elon Musk], and thank you for always being so kind to me!”

The video, which has been reposted on Bluesky, shows Benioff and Musk talking to a gold Optimus robot, which says it’s “just chilling” to kick things off. Benioff then asks, “Hey Optimus, do you know where I can get a coke?” The robot seems to really struggle with that one. It replies, “Sorry I don’t… Have real-time info, but I can take you to the kitchen if you want to check for a coke there.”

Even that seems to be asking a lot of Optimus. It stands there staring at the camera with its soulless void of a face for several seconds, and Musk can be heard off camera saying, “I think we need to give it a bit more… room.”

The robot finally lurches into motion with a sound like rattling plastic and hobbles down an aisle in an empty office (apparently toward a kitchen, which may or may not have coke). Off camera, Musk is quick to add, “It’ll be able to walk a lot faster.”

For context, this is the robot that just last week Musk claimed will eventually make up “80% of Tesla’s value.” Benioff claims in his tweet that the robot will be “tackling human work for $200K–$500K. Productivity game-changer!”

If Optimus can’t even retrieve drinks for $500,000, it’s hard to believe it’s a “game-changer” of any kind, let alone worth betting Tesla’s future on. Despite that, Musk has repeatedly insisted these humanoid robots are the future, even claiming there will be 10 billion of them wandering the Earth by 2040 (for at least $20,000 each).

Even its most impressive skill, the ability to walk on two legs, isn’t all that special. As BlueSky user El Gato Astronomico‬ put it in a comment, “Walking without falling over is both extremely hard to accomplish and by far the easiest thing to get a robot to do, so this thing is like 11% as good as Boston Dynamics atlas from 7 years ago, 3% towards being able to do anything that could be considered useful and 0.05% towards doing it below cost.”

Another commenter summed up the whole demo, saying, “Imagine how much it doesn’t work if this is the video they put out.” Even if Optimus knew where to find a coke, it appears to still have joint-less mannequin arms, so it couldn’t have picked up a drink anyway.

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