Tesla's Humanoid Robot: Market Potential and Challenges

Tesla's potential with humanoid robots, leveraging expertise from electric vehicles, could lead to a $25 trillion market opportunity.

### Tesla's Optimus: Disrupting the $25T Humanoid Robot Market
* 🤖 Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus, is a groundbreaking project that requires designing every part of the robot from scratch, due to the **lack of an existing supply chain for humanoid robots**.
* 🚗 Similar to how Tesla transformed the EV supply chain to scale up production, Optimus leverages Tesla's expertise in **electrical and mechanical engineering, AI, and scale manufacturing**.
* 💰 With **$24 billion in cash on hand** and a profitable EV business, Tesla is well-positioned to invest in building the new supply chain, training compute, factories, and hiring necessary for **Optimus**.
* 🌐 Optimus will utilize Tesla's AI hardware and software capabilities, Vision system, and inference compute, benefiting from the **cost advantages built through the car business**.
* 🏭 "Prototypes are easy, production is hard." Tesla's experience in scaling production is a significant advantage for Optimus, enabling it to achieve a **much lower cost per unit**.
* 💸 Elon Musk estimates the market opportunity for humanoid robots to be **$25 trillion**, considering their potential to **perform human tasks at a fraction of the cost**.
* 🚀 Elon Musk has a track record of turning seemingly "**Pie in the Sky**" visions into reality, such as Neuralink, Starlink, and SpaceX's reusable rockets.
* 🌍 The future of AI-powered robots, including humanoid robots, is expected to be a **transformative trend**, with or without Tesla's involvement.

all right, so Tesla just had their shareholder meeting where Elon Musk gave a big presentation about the company's current offerings and their future offerings. But one of the very specific things that Elon talked about was the humanoid robot, and the humanoid robot is something that we've covered extensively on this channel. Dave Lee on X, who's also on YouTube, a fantastic resource for anything Tesla related, he put up a 3-minute long clip of the presentation that talks specifically about the humanoid robot opportunity. And I want to riff off of this clip because there's so much in there that I want to discuss. So let's go ahead and take a listen. TLA is going to be by far the leader in that. You're seeing a lot of robot startups, and but I think it's actually very challenging to do Optimus as a robot startup because what we found to make Optimus work, we've had to design EV design from first principles from scratch every part of the robot. So the motors, the gearbox, the Power Electronics, the communication.

system everything had to be done from scratch. We found that there's basically nothing. There's no supply chain. So, even though there are many electric motors made in the world, there's no supply chain for the types of motors and sensors and gearboxes that are needed for a humanoid robot. Now what's really interesting there is that may sound like a novel thing that Tesla or any other company had to go through to get a giant amount of products out, uh, to the world. You know, there's nothing there there for us to build the thing that we're trying to build. So, it's becomes essentially impossible to do that. But it's very interesting that Tesla, the same exact company with the same exact leader, essentially did the same exact thing with the electric vehicle. Now, the one differentiator between the electric vehicle and the human robot is that they were able to use some of the existing battery supply chain to create electric vehicles. But in reality, in order to get to the millions of units per year that Tesla is, uh, looking to produce now and the other

competitors that have come on board that are also creating electric vehicles. The supply chain for EVS has had to essentially transform, and it's very interesting hearing Elon talk about the human or robot opportunity in exactly the same way that they're essentially going to have to get into a market that's going to require a brand new supply chain from scratch that they're going to have to build. However, to Tesla's benefit, in my opinion, this is something they've done before with the electric vehicle, and now they're getting into something that is a smaller form factor. It's a lot crazier as literally Science Fiction with a freaking robot moving around, but it's very interesting hearing him talk about human or robots the same way he was talking about electric vehicles back in 2008 and 2007. But because it requires so much ground-up design, designing every motor, gearbox, sensor, Power Electronics from scratch, it's very hard for a startup to, if not impossible for a startup to replicate that. But at Tesla, we have the world's best electrical engineering, uh, I think.

we've got the world's best mechanical engineering for gearboxes and for your electric motors. Power Electronics. You know, we have the resources to do that. It applies quite well. Another really interesting tip it there is that the company versus a startup is much better positioned. And the reason why that is, is if you look at say the history of Tesla. Again, we use Tesla as an example because it's almost like everything they've done with the EV applies with a human or robot in a sense. Back when they were making it, they were making the electric vehicle in 2008 with the initial Roadster, and the Model S in 2012, and the Model 3 in 2016. Tesla was in a very weird financial situation where they didn't have enough cash on hand to build those things. They've had to raise cash in the past through stock sales. They took a loan out of the government back in the early 2010s, which they paid back in full. But now the company is in a position where they have, I think, 24 billion of cash on hand.

their balance sheet, and they're also generating a profit every single quarter, selling their electric vehicles. So they're operating from a place of strength versus a place of weakness when it comes to investing all the money they're going to have to put in to build out the supply chain that we just talked about for the human or robots, build out the training compute that's going to be required to run the AI algorithms that the robots going to use to move around and pick up stuff, the money to actually build out the factories and buy the robots that are going to build the robots, hire the people, and it's all basically subsidized by the electric vehicle business in a sense, which is such a fascinating thing. Like it's very curious how Tesla has, I think, very successfully pivoted away from getting people focused on the electric car business, which will, you know, will make a whole different video about that, and now onto the human of robot. I think this is a very smart strategy by the company, but it's very interesting again. It's like electric

vehicle human or robot there's a lot of similarities there and then you also have to have the brain. You need the you need a power efficient inference computer, which we've got for the car, and we'll be using an Optimus. You need AI real you need to be the best in real world AI, and Tesla is the best in real world AI, so you need all of these. You need a very strong hand of cards in order to make a compelling robot, and then you also need to be very good at scale manufacturing so in order to have the robot not cost like hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to make it cost like you know 10 or $20,000 you actually need to design for manufacturing and be very good at manufacturing and what in my experience prototypes are easy compared to volume manufacturing prototypes are easy production is hard relatively speaking so Tesla has the production capability it has the engineering capability and it has the AI hardware and software capability and again another comment that hearkens back to Tesla's history.

when it comes to the electric vehicle prototypes, are easy production is hard. If you listen to Elon Musk, you know this guy has said this sentence a thousand times. It seems but it rings very true. There's actual proof in the pudding in the electric vehicle business specifically that this is very much true. Tesla is one of the very few, if not the only automaker that's making an EV at profit while every other automaker maybe short of BYD in China maybe one other one are making EVs out of profit. The same thing is going to apply to the humanoid robot most likely and the scale piece that that piece that he talks about, getting a humanoid robot that is built for manufacturing is such a huge advantage for Tesla because you know one of the ways to view Tesla truly is as a technology company that an expert at bringing set of the art technologies at scale. That's their core expertise making almost 2 million electric vehicles per year that can drive themselves okay that are

affordable and profitable is a unique expertise that's required for a company to be successful, and if you apply the same exact thought process to the human or robot, what this means is that if Tesla can execute an Elon Musk is Right, obviously that the human robot's going to have a huge advantage, not just from a cost perspective, but from a numbers perspective. Instead of like, let's say if we use again figure AI, I don't know if it's going to be like this, well let's just use them as an example, uh, with $2 billion, it might be able to make, I don't know, a thousand human or robots, 10,000 human or robots that let's assume do similar, uh, similar task as the Optimus robot. The advantage for Tesla is that they have multiple decades, potentially by that point, of expertise in bringing large things to huge numbers, and with huge numbers, you get huge advantages from a cost perspective. The more units you produce through a factory, the lower your costs become. You essentially, instead of it costing $100,000 to build

a human or robot it costs maybe 30,000 20,000 10,000 and what's a very important piece of that puzzle too is the type of technology that Tesla is selected to take with the manufacturing of this robot using their Vision system and the inference compute basically the ai ai computer they're going to have on board that they're already utilizing in their cars. What that means is that they've already built a supply chain for all those parts through the cars that they're going to be able to put in the robots uh at much lower cost than a new player coming in and putting a brand new computer or camera or lighter or whatever they're going to use in their robot. So all the cost benefits that Tesla has built through the car business will also a leak over into the bot business specifically talking about the hard were required for the AI brain to move. We're so early in this as it pertains to Tesla obviously nobody even knows if this is going to come to fruition of course of course this is all

future talk. Trying to figure out if this is likely or not, but the pieces are there for Tesla to very much flex its scale muscle, its manufacturing muscle, its AI muscle, to bring human robots to life at potentially millions of units per year at a much lower cost point than competitors. And one of the, again, the similarities are so crazy with the EV business. Where do we see this biggest in relation to Tesla and everybody else? It's how they're approaching self-driving technology. If you look at a Tesla today that has FSD in it, the full self-driving suite, which Tesla thinks will have it be able to have their cars drive themselves without a driver as early as the end of this year, potentially next year with their robot taxi network, which to have an event for on August 8th. With that piece, you have a car that costs maybe $35,000 to build that will be able to drive itself versus a WH that costs up to $250,000 to build per car that will do

basically the same thing, but the weo is limited to very small parts of the country and only cities that it's allowed to operate in, whereas the Tesla can basically operate anywhere, right? Because the approach they're using is Vision, without having to map the roads, and something very similar could also apply to the human or robot. Again, Tesla has expertise. They have a thing that they've built in the past, that robot on Wheels, as Elon Musk likes to call the car. A lot of that expertise seems like it's going to leak over into the bot. Even the most optimistic estimates that I've seen for Optimus, The Optimist, I think undercount the magnitude of what this robot will be able to do. You know, as I said at the beginning of the presentation, I, you know, I agree with the Aran bestest analysis that autonomous transport is, is called sort of a 5 to 7 trillion doll market cap situation. Optimus, I think, is, is a, a 25 literally $25 trillion market cap situation. Now, I don't want to

want to trivialize what's necessary to get there. I mean, it's an immense amount of work that is required to get there. Like, super difficult, but we are moving very fast down that road, and we're going to make it happen. Now, of course, that number sounds insane, absolutely ridiculous. I made videos about the long-term potential of the Huno robot that I've, uh, I think posted about a year ago with what I think the size of the market could be for the robot for Tesla. None of it is financial investment advice. It's just an exercise I like to do to try and understand what the impact could be from a technology like this, and I just share it with the world. I just put it on my channel, and for the last year or so, there's been a lot. I've seen the comments mocking the number, mocking the numbers, but it's very interesting now hearing the CEO of Tesla putting a number to what the market opportunity is for something like a human robot: 25 trillion.

market cap. If we want to put that within the context of say an Apple or a Microsoft or an Nvidia now, they're about a $3 trillion company with today's dollars. What Elon Musk is basically saying, the combination of the human or robot and the robot taxi Network could make Tesla a $30 trillion plus market cap company, which is 10 times larger than the largest companies of today, right? And so at face value, you think about that number, you're like, that is the craziest thing I've ever heard. This guy is insane. The guy making the video repeating that garbage is insane, okay. But the reality of the matter is, is if you think about the usefulness of a human robot, who cares if Tesla's doing it? Who cares if, like, forget who's doing it, how useful would it be to have a robot that is like a human that does human jobs, right? Especially if it's affordable. If everybody can buy it, it's not a product where you have to test if there's demand for it. It's not a product

where you have to go and do a bunch of market research to see hm will this you know will this work in this area. I wonder if I can build a business to you know make some profit in. I don't know balloons just pick something right it. You don't have to do any of that work. It's it's very self-evident and obvious that if a human or robot exists that is useful and it can do human tasks at a fraction of the cost of a human, this thing is going to be purchased by freaking everybody right. And so if it's going to be purchased by freaking everybody, then in theory the size of the market of the human or robot is the size of the economy of the global economy, and the global economy right now is somewhere upwards of hundred trillion dollar, whatever that number is right. And so you fast forward into the future 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road, and this technology without a doubt comes to fruition. Who knows if it's Tes somebody.

else the numbers speak for themselves and so one of the things that I want to caution is you know you hear a number like 25 trillion or 30 trillion and for some folks the initial reaction is that that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard but in reality it becomes of exercise an exercise of if it's possible right if it's possible is that number really that stupid and very quickly you'll find that the answer is no it's not stupid at all if anything it's potentially uh undervaluing the number because of how groundbreaking the technology is it's all centered around execution can Tesla do this can Elon Musk bring this Vision to life and make it something that's real instead of something that's hype or something that you know it's pie in the sky right now with this guy specifically with Elon he seems to have a track record of putting what folks think are Pie in the Sky Visions out there for people to poop on and then they come you know they become reality

uh chip in someone's brain. We saw Noland, the first uh trial patient for Neuralink. Crazy uh Starlink space internet that's freaking everywhere and affordable. It happened enabled by reusable Rockets from SpaceX. Everybody thought that was the craziest thing ever. There is a freaking reusable rocket landing every other day from SpaceX. And they have their Starship thing. Uh electric vehicles, something that people wanted, something that was profitable. Self-driving cars using Vision only, not needing Lar. So there's like a track record of setting insane things, you know, saying insane things, and then the insane things becoming reality, right? And this one is like the craziest one of them all because it's obvious to see how big of an opportunity this is. We've made a video on this channel that outlines the future, the likely future of AI-powered robots, like the humanoid robot from Tesla, the Optimus robot, right? On this video, I'll make a link for it in the description and the comment section below, where it's not even Tesla focus.

talks about the likely trend of human or robots into the future. And we partner with three think X to bring this, uh, feature to life, this piece to life, and this really helps frame just how big of an opportunity human or robots are. Period. Forget Tesla, forget figure, just human or robots, right? I highly recommend you check that out. And then if you enjoyed this content, like and subscribe. And if you want to support the channel, I have links in the description below. And we'll see you on the next one because the world's about to get freaking crazy. We're going to be covering this human or robot story very, very closely here on my channel. Thank you so much. Have a fantastic day. Bye-bye.

Tesla's AI Powered Robot (Optimus) Is Actually Insane.

Farzad

Tesla's Future Offerings and the Challenge of the Humanoid Robot

Elon Musk presented Tesla's current and future offerings at a shareholder meeting, highlighting the challenge of creating a humanoid robot from scratch.

Tesla's experience in building electric vehicles has prepared them for establishing a new supply chain for the humanoid robot, despite the significant design and engineering hurdles.

The company's confidence in its electrical engineering capabilities positions them as a leader in tackling the demanding task of developing a humanoid robot.

Tesla's Strategic Shift to Robotics and AI

Tesla has successfully transitioned from focusing on electric vehicles to investing in the development of human-like robots, leveraging its strong financial position.

The company's pivot is driven by the idea of using the profits from the electric vehicle business to subsidize the expansion of its robotics and AI endeavors.

Tesla's expertise in power efficient inference computers and real-world AI positions it as a leader in the field of robotics.

Tesla's Advantage in Electric Vehicle and Humanoid Robot Production

Elon Musk's statement about the difficulty of electric vehicle production is supported by the fact that Tesla is one of the few companies making a profit from EVs.

Tesla's expertise in large-scale production gives them a significant advantage in the potential manufacturing of humanoid robots, allowing for cost efficiency and the utilization of existing technology from their car production.

Tesla's Potential in Human Robot Manufacturing

Tesla is poised to mass-produce human robots at a much lower cost than its competitors, leveraging its scale, manufacturing, and AI capabilities.

The company's approach to self-driving technology, using vision without road mapping, gives it a significant advantage over others, with the potential to operate anywhere.

CEO Elon Musk believes that the market opportunity for Tesla's human robot, named Optimus, could reach a staggering $25 trillion, driven by autonomous transport and other applications.

The Potential Impact of Tesla's Humanoid Robot on the Market

Elon Musk believes that Tesla's humanoid robot could propel the company to a market cap of over $30 trillion, ten times larger than today's largest companies.

The key is the robot's potential to perform human tasks at a fraction of the cost, making it a highly valuable and potentially groundbreaking technology.

Despite initial skepticism, Musk has a track record of turning visionary ideas into reality, making the ambitious market cap goal seem plausible.

The Impact of Neuralink and AI-Powered Robots

Neuralink's first trial on a patient, SpaceX's Starlink internet, and the development of AI-powered robots are all part of the pattern of Elon Musk's seemingly crazy ideas becoming reality.

The focus on AI-powered robots, beyond Tesla, is seen as a massive opportunity, with a video outlining their future impact.

The channel plans to closely cover the human-robot story and encourages viewers to check out the related content.