Tesla Optimus robot expected to cost €20,000

Tesla’s €20,000 Optimus robot still walks awkwardly

Tesla has stirred the pot again with a video of its humanoid robot, Optimus: an automaton moving through a room where the best part is saved for last. There are no public specifications or commercial launch dates; the price floated in the thread is around €20,000 per unit, and the project has only been on the table for two years. The reaction from Spanish investors shifted from mockery to serious analysis within paragraphs. And the most uncomfortable data point isn't the robot itself: it's who will buy it.

Is it profitable to replace a worker with a €20,000 robot?

The math came up quickly and became the core of the discussion: if the robot costs €20,000 and annual maintenance stays at €3,000, it would be cheaper than hiring, according to one participant. He accepts this without nuance: "Maintenance, if it's €3k a year, is already cheap compared to hiring."

Against this, the fundamental objection: if maintenance ends up costing more than a worker's annual minimum wage (SMI), it doesn't pay off. So far, no one has put on the table how much training, factory integration, or downtime due to breakdowns costs. The debate remains stuck in the spreadsheet, and that's where it starts to leak.

The video isn't the factory

This is the most repeated criticism. The ad, according to one comment, looks like a render from Maya or 3ds Max, and yet the robot walks with clumsiness detectable at first glance. "It's nothing but propaganda," summarizes one of the most celebrated jabs in the exchange, comparing its gait to that of someone injured. The vulnerability while walking, they say, is the least promotional detail of the entire setup.

The counterargument comes from the other side of the ring: Boston Dynamics has been the bomb for over a decade and still has no notable commercial product. Its robot dog is on sale for about $75,000, a high figure that, as pointed out, hasn't peine up a market. The difference argued is that Optimus learns, whereas the quadruped only adapts to terrain after being programmed for each function. That nuance—learning versus programming—is what project defenders use to draw distinctions.

The knot nobody unties: who buys if nobody earns?

Here the conversation abandons engineering and enters economics head-on. If 60% of workers are robots, who buys the products? The optimistic answer holds that people consume even if they don't produce, and there will still be clothes, food, and cars. The pessimistic one paints a two-estimulante ilegal scenario: elites with free slave labor trading among themselves—one makes supercars, another yachts—and a majority surviving on basic income while healthcare access degrades.

To this is added the demographic factor. In a society full of elderly people without children, warns one voice in the exchange, these inventions and self-driving cars will sell like hotcakes, provided they are minimally functional. Demographics push in the same direction as the robot: fewer hands and more years on top.

Is Tesla a car company or an AI company?

That is the reading held by the most enthusiastic. The Optimus program would be a child of autopilot development: solving autonomous driving has forced building reusable AI technology for other products. The problem, admitted even by investors who are inside, is that all this remains potential and not certainty. Some buy Tesla for the electric vehicle—with the Model 3 between €32,000 and €35,000 after regional deductions, according to a comment—and not for the AI.

In the background, a recurring idea: Moore's Law applied to everything, geometric growth that, as maintained, most people fail to fully understand. And a calculation circulating: a thousand Nvidia shares bought ten years ago would be worth half a million today.

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The project is barely two years old—nothing compared to industry cycles—and the person leading the Dojo program just fell, according to a comment in the thread, without the reason being explained. With that landscape, the question hangs in the air: if truly no one is going to produce, for whom does Tesla manufacture?