At Tesla’s latest “Autopilot technology and Optimus” event in Miami, one of the droids stood behind a table of water bottles, doing its best impression of a guy whose livelihood is mostly dependent on tips, when it suddenly clutched its temples, staggered like it had been shoved (it wasn’t), then collapsed flat on its back.
If there was any question that Optimus uses teleop for their robots. Here one clearly has a guy take the headset off and it falls over.
Absolutely hilarious though. pic.twitter.com/4gYVohjY00— CIX
(@cixliv) December 8, 2025
That gave me immediate flashbacks to a scene from a movie that I was probably too young to have watched when I did: Robocop 2. In it, OCP, the overtly evil tech warfare corporation that built Robocop, is trying to make a newer, better replacement — using deranged criminals.
In a brief montage that is simultaneously delightful and mentally scarring, we see different test subjects going berserk in their own unique ways. One of them rips its helmet off to reveal a screaming human skull before collapsing out of frame with a big junky clank.
Uncanny. Life imitating art.
Or was it?
Creating an autonomous water bottle-slinging robot that rips off its own head before collapsing would be giving Tesla way too much credit, even in its spectacular failure. The truth (the much likelier truth anyway) makes more sense if you don’t have that Robocop 2 montage to immediately jump to. Pay closer attention to its movements before it collapses. It’s not ripping off his own head. Those are the actions of an offscreen puppeteer removing the VR helmet they used to control these supposedly autonomous machines.
That robot isn’t doing anything on its own. Like The Wizard of Oz, it’s all the work of the mysterious man behind the curtain, pulling levers and turning cranks. That puppeteer appears to have taken off the VR mask without following proper logout procedures, giving us a glimpse behind the curtain as it fell through one.
This is common in the robotics industry. What makes it funny and pathetic is that Tesla really, really, really wants you to think its robots are capable of doing all the stuff on their own, even though it’s all just trickery. It’s all marketing. But this video is the truth of modern robotics, a truth that other robotics companies don’t mind cluing you in on. This Harper’s article about the humanoid robot industry offers a pretty good primer on the difference between the real robotics visionaries out there and the con artists.
Elon Musk has claimed Optimus could pump $10 trillion into Tesla’s future and push its market cap toward $25 trillion. Yet the robot currently can’t hand someone a bottle of water without reenacting a grim slapstick death scene. How very Elon.
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