Elon Musk says Tesla’s fake robot might be ready by September 30th

Image: Tesla

It is not meant to distract from the news that he is planning on laying off about 10 percent of his workforce and that he is shifting the company's "ai day" event from August to September in order to show off.

The humanoid robot that Musk said would take on boring tasks was named after him. As with all things Musk, it's difficult to see the reality from the smokescreen he throws out. After promising to reveal a working prototype sometime in 2022, the evening was capped by a person in a spandex robot costume dancing.

There are many fanciful ideas that never panned out, like a solar-powered Supercharger network, robotic snake-style chargers, and city-to-city rocket travel.

When there is bad news, Musk is great at generating headlines. Federal regulators are looking into whether he broke the rules when he initially invested in the company. It's still under investigation for the tendency of its vehicles to crash into parked emergency vehicles while using the same artificial intelligence software that will supposedly power this robot.

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Don’t overthink it: Elon Musk’s Tesla Bot is a joke

Some of Musk's promises are fulfilled. Some of the cars he makes are reliable, but not at the expense of the driver's attention. He builds rockets that can be used again and again. A Mars-sized grain of salt should be used to evaluate Musk's humanoid robot.

No company on the planet is close to building a robot that can replace a human. Boston Dynamics has never described its machines as anything other than experimental. The Atlas robot has been working for over a decade.

If you think Musk will leapfrog that work in a year, I have some oceanfront property in Arizona.