What Elon SaidAn archive of questions answered

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Optimus & Robots

49 answers

Opinion

How much memory will robots need?

“Silly analysis. Robot RAM needs will exceed everything else on Earth, as you need the robots to be on physical substates in order to shape atoms. Super intelligence needs will vastly exceed that, but ~100% of SI will be deep space compute. Obviously.”

— Elon Musk, 26 October 2026 · Post on X ↗ · In the archive

Opinion

What will make up most of Tesla's value?

“Optimus and Cybercab will be the vast majority of Tesla’s value. The only things that will scale to incredible size (K2 and beyond) economically are super intelligence, robots, solar power and mass to space. And, of course, if you have the first two, the rest will follow.”

— Elon Musk, 18 October 2026 · Post on X ↗ · In the archive

Opinion

Why build your own chips (AI5, Terafab)?

“We cut our RAM in half for the Tesla AI5 chip (now 72GB of LP5) and 1/3 for AI6 (now 144GB of LP6). This was the only way to get enough volume for Optimus production and greatly reduces cost. As it turns out, we think this will have a negligible effect on Optimus performance, as memory bandwidth is a bigger limiting factor than total memory storage (bandwidth was held constant).”

— Elon Musk, 1 October 2026 · Post on X ↗ · In the archive

Opinion

What will give humans meaning when AI and robots can do everything?

“I mean, I do struggle with this question. I think people will, will find ways to be happy in the, in the same way that say people who retire seem to be relatively, you know, fairly happy even though they’re not working. But I think the reality is that you, humans will not, there won’t be anything that humans can do that, that the AI and the robots can’t do better. One analogy might be gardening, you know, where you don’t have to grow your own fruits and vegetables. You can just go buy them from the store. But sometimes people like to grow their own fruits and vegetables and make dinner for friends, and it’s kind of a nice touch.”

— Elon Musk, 6 August 2026 · Watch: YouTube (18:57) ↗ · In the archive

Prediction

When will Optimus be produced and sold, and how many?

“Optimus is a very sophisticated robot. It will be immensely difficult to get the cost to $20k. Not easy at all, but it will eventually happen. Production volume needs to be above 1M/year for that. Price will be driven by demand, but eventually even price will get to ~$20k.”

— Elon Musk, 26 November 2024 · Post on X ↗ · In the archive

Fact

Will Optimus have a physical kill switch? (asked on X)

“I think one of the things that's going to be important is to have a localized ROM chip on the robot that cannot be updated over the air. Where if you, for example, were to say, “Stop, stop, stop,” if anyone said that, then the robot would stop, you know, type of thing. And that's not updatable remotely. I think it's going to be important to have safety features like that.”

— Elon Musk, 14 April 2022 · Watch: Elon Musk talks Twitter, Tesla and how his brain works -- live at TED2022 · 7:09 ↗ · In the archive

Opinion

Why build a humanoid robot?

“It needs to be able to do things that people do… It needs to be able to work with tools, carry a bag, that kind of thing. Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because our cars are like semi-sentient robots on wheels…”

— Elon Musk, 19 August 2021 · Watch: Tesla video (2:08:00) ↗ · In the archive