Elon Musk rips media reports of robot 'attack' in Tesla's Texas factory
Antonio Masiello via Getty Images
- Elon Musk isn't happy with how the media has covered an accident involving his factory's robots.
- "Truly shameful of the media to dredge up an injury from two years ago," Musk wrote on X.
- Musk said the reports falsely implied that the accident was due to his humanoid Optimus robots.
Elon Musk has slammed recent media reports of a robot "attack" in a Tesla factory in Austin.
"Truly shameful of the media to dredge up an injury from two years ago due to a simple industrial Kuka robot arm (found in all factories) and imply that it is due to Optimus now," Musk wrote in an X post on Wednesday.
The Tesla CEO was responding to an X user who'd shared a Daily Mail report from Tuesday about a factory robot incident in 2021.
The Information had also covered the incident in a story published last month. According to the outlet, two witnesses said that an engineer was running software updates on the factory's robots when he was grabbed and pinned against the surface by one of the machines.
The witnesses also said that the engineer was left bleeding after the robot had sunk its claws into his body. The engineer eventually escaped the robot's clutches when another worker pressed the emergency stop button, per The Information.
Musk's ire at the Daily Mail's post, however, appears to be at the outlet's framing of the accident. The Daily Mail's story used a thumbnail featuring Tesla's humanoid Optimus robots — not the Kuka robot arm that was involved in the 2021 incident.
Musk's defense of the Optimus robots will come as no surprise as he has high hopes for them. When he unveiled them last year, he said the economy could become "quasi-infinite" if the Optimus robots were capable of manual labor.
"This means a future of abundance. A future where there is no poverty, where you could have whatever you want in terms of products and services," Musk said then.
Safety complaints, however, have long dogged Musk's Tesla factories. In 2020, California regulators said Tesla had sent them incomplete factory injury reports.
And it's not just the US. Recently, in April, Chinese inspectors said they wanted to punish the company for safety weaknesses, per Caixin Global. According to the report, a Tesla factory worker in Shanghai died after getting crushed by factory equipment.
In October, Tesla rejected claims from a German union and the country's media outlets that the Berlin Gigfactory lacked proper safety provisions.
Representatives for Tesla and Kuka did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.