Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect it's going dormant for a couple years and then he'll say "Hey, this robot thing isn't working out, so we're closing the facility." He doesn't have any desire to stay in California.
A reasonable guess. As far as I can tell, the number of humanoid robots doing anything productive is zero. It's all demos. This is far harder than self-driving. As a guy from Waymo once said in a talk, "the output is only two numbers" (speed and steering angle). Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Tesla is not the leader. Remember the "cobot" boom of about five years ago?…
Agreed, thing is the robot hardware isn't the hard part anymore, the top ten robots are all sufficient to be transformative if they had good enough AI.
My bet is on Google/Gemini being the first to market from what I've seen so far.
Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.