We need to talk about this clip.

Yes, these videos are fun, and yes, the engineering behind these machines is impressive. That said, this and all those other gee-whiz, look-at-the-cool-robot stories are leaving out key context and often doing real damage. 

A humanoid robot won a half-marathon in Beijing in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, finishing faster than Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo's world record. Read more: https://cnn.it/4sGl276

[image or embed]

— CNN (@cnn.com) April 19, 2026 at 2:51 AM

The practical value of these demonstrations is exactly the same as that of a high school competition to build Rube Goldberg machines. Hopefully, someone involved will apply something they've learned to something of actual use.

But where's the harm in having some fun with robots? To answer that we have to dig into hype and market bubbles and everybody's favorite real life Tiny Stark.

At this point, I'm not sure I even need to argue the idea that Elon Musk is a horrible person. He has accumulated the world's largest fortune almost entirely through stock pumps and shady accounting. The damage he has done through his involvement with Trump will take decades to calculate, as will his support of neo-Nazi movements here and in Europe. Not to mention that he has a messiah complex, he's a terrible engineer, and he's just annoying.

I could fill (and have filled) pages listing the crimes and embarrassments of Elon, but most readers, and well-informed people in general, would probably already know most of the highlights. What fewer people realize is how Musk's fortune now rests largely on the narrative this video helps support.

Though the absurd one- to two-trillion-dollar valuation of the money-losing SpaceX complicates things, in terms of even semi-liquid assets, virtually all of Elon Musk's wealth comes from Tesla stock. This is a company with a P/E ratio of over 372 at the moment, despite the fact that sales of the company's automobiles are cratering (even worse than we thought now that we've learned that the biggest purchaser of the Cybertruck appears to be other Elon Musk companies). Add to that Waymo beating Tesla's robotaxi service like a red-headed stepchild, and, even with decent sales of power packs, you have a stock that would drop by close to two orders of magnitude if priced on fundamentals.

The primary justification for considering Tesla by far the most valuable car company in the world is the absolutely insane belief that the company is about to usher in a golden age of abundance thanks to its Optimus humanoid robot. This isn't just unsupportable bullshit; it is layers of unsupportable bullshit.

The future of labor may very well belong to robots (it certainly does in space, but that's a topic for another time), but it almost certainly does not belong to bipedal humanoid robots. Musk, whose ideas about the future are derived almost entirely from juvenile postwar science fiction, deserves, for lack of a better word, "credit" for the current humanoid bubble. Billions of dollars are being poured into designs that virtually every roboticist not on the payroll will tell you are a technological dead end. The use cases for these C-3PO knockoffs are vanishingly small. In the vast majority of cases, wheels or treads beat legs, and where legs are called for, "four legs good; two legs bad."

There's no way that the total addressable market for humanoid robots justifies a trillion-dollar-plus company. What's worse, even within that niche field, Tesla probably isn't even in the top five. It certainly can't match the technology of Boston Dynamics, which is primarily owned by the profitable car company Hyundai, and yet the market cap of the former is more than 10 times that of the latter.

The humanoid bubble is bad engineering crowding out good tech and propping up the fortunes of bad, dangerous people. The sooner it pops, the better.