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Musk shows Optimus folding clothes — with the admission it wasn't autonomous

Robots

From the Robots digest for Oct 28, 2026

Continuing thread: Tesla Optimus

Part of: Arc · Humanoid robots doing paid work at scale

Sources MSN

What happened: Coverage carried by MSN (published October 28, ~12:56 PM ET) re-sets Elon Musk's Optimus folding-clothes demonstration beside his admission that the robot was not operating autonomously while doing it, and compares the clip with Figure AI — the OpenAI-, Nvidia-, Microsoft- and Jeff Bezos-backed startup — demonstrating a humanoid responding to spoken instructions.

What's genuinely new: The non-autonomy admission attached to a specific household-task demo — a one-line statement of the demo-versus-capability gap in Tesla's humanoid story, landing days after the company said initial Optimus mass production had begun at Fremont and put outside customer deliveries around late 2027.

Watch: Whether Tesla shows an autonomous version of the folding-clothes task, and how the demo-gap framing weighs on the late-2027 outside-customer timeline.

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