It's basically the story of the mechanical Turk but with a really dystopian final act

Everyone here probably already knows the basics, but just to review:

Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, and he has been using his tremendous wealth and power to push far-right causes, white supremacist movements, and huge sweetheart government contracts. The majority of his fortune comes from Tesla stock holdings and compensation packages approved by arguably the most corrupt—and certainly the most well-paid—board of directors in corporate America.

Based solely on its small and shrinking car sales (the only significant product that Tesla actually makes) the company is, by any reasonable standard, overvalued by more than one and probably close to two orders of magnitude. This insanely inflated stock price is justified largely, perhaps primarily, by investors’ faith in the Optimus humanoid robot.

In order for this market cap to make sense, you have to believe that bipedal humanoid robots represent the future of labor, that the time frame for them revolutionizing the world’s economy is five—or at the very worst, ten—years away, and that the dominant manufacturer of the entire world’s market will be Tesla.

While it is entirely possible, even likely, that most physical labor will be done by robots sometime in the future, every other proposition in that list is absurd.  It’s true that great progress has been made, but the prototypes we are seeing now are still years away from the performance being promised and that's not even the biggest obstacle. Despite the name, according to the large majority of roboticists not actually on the payroll of these companies, Optimus and other humanoids are a decidedly suboptimal design for all but a handful of situations: expensive, inefficient, unreliable, unstable, too large or too small for most tasks, and obscenely over-engineered for virtually every job. Even if the future belongs to robots, it almost certainly won't be these robots.  
But perhaps silliest of all is the belief that Tesla is the cutting-edge company in this field. 

 Matt Novak writing for Gizmodo:

Tesla held a special pop-up event over the weekend for Art Basel Miami Beach, the international art fair in Florida. The pop-up was dubbed “The Future of Autonomy Visualized” and reportedly featured Elon Musk’s Cybercab prototype and Optimus robots. But a video from the event is going viral for all the wrong reasons. And it’s pretty hilarious.

The video, which appears to have first been posted to r/teslamotors on Reddit, shows an Optimus robot knock over several bottles of water on a table before lifting its arms into the air. The arms move in ways that would be consistent with taking off a VR headset, and then they fall heavily, with one hitting a water on the table that seems to explode and shoot water everywhere. After that, Optimus appears to go lifeless and falls backward.

The video is just five seconds long, but it tells quite a funny story in that short burst of time.

What’s happening here? Many people online speculate that an unseen person was controlling the Optimus robot, and that person took off their headset before disconnecting. And that seems to be the most likely explanation.

This kind of robotic control is called teleoperation, and it has been in existence since at least the 1940s. Sometimes called a waldo, Walt Disney showed off how he made the 1964 New York World’s Fair attraction Carousel of Progress with a similar technology.

 

Tesla Optimus
byu/Decent_Cheesecake643 inteslamotors

 

 As Novak points out, this is not the first time Musk has tried to pass off puppetry for automation with Optimus -- at least twice sharp-eyed viewers have spotted controllers off to the side in videos -- nor is this sort of thing limited to the robotics division. We've seen faked demonstrations of self-driving cars and solar roofs along with suspicious accounting practices, data suppression, and projections so unrealistic they can only be called lies. 

Unlike with LLMs where serious people are having real discussions about the state and promise of the technology, the case for humanoids is nothing but hype and the the kind of crude approach to engineering that comes from getting your ideas about technology from old sci-fi shows. the entire sub-bubble is an embarrassment, but you know what's more embarrassing than being a humanoid robot company? Having to fake your demos so no one will notice you're being lapped by pretty much all of your competitors