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.<\/p>\n
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)<\/a> with AI, calling it the “Agentforce.” Benioff gifted that same awkward term to Musk’s robot in his tweet.<\/p>\n Elon\u2019s Tesla Optimus \ud83e\udd16\ud83d\udd25 is here! Dawn of the physical Agentforce revolution, tackling human work for $200K\u2013$500K. Productivity game-changer! Congrats @elonmusk, and thank you for always being so kind to me! \ud83d\ude80 #Tesla #Optimus pic.twitter.com\/bA5IYIylE1September 3, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n “Elon\u2019s Tesla Optimus is here,” Benioff wrote. “Dawn of the physical Agentforce revolution, tackling human work for $200K\u2013$500K. Productivity game-changer! Congrats [Elon Musk], and thank you for always being so kind to me!”<\/p>\n Related articles<\/p>\n The video, which has been reposted on Bluesky<\/a>, 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\u2026 Have real-time info, but I can take you to the kitchen if you want to check for a coke there.”<\/p>\n 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\u2026 room.”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n For context, this is the robot that just last week Musk claimed<\/a> will eventually make up “80% of Tesla’s value.” Benioff claims in his tweet that the robot will be “tackling human work for $200K\u2013$500K. Productivity game-changer!”<\/p>\n 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<\/a> wandering the Earth by 2040 (for at least $20,000 each).<\/p>\n Even its most impressive skill, the ability to walk on two legs, isn’t all that special. As BlueSky user El Gato Astronomico\u202c put it in a comment<\/a>, “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.”<\/p>\n