Elon Musk Says You'll "Most Likely" Be Able To Beat His Tesla Bot in a Fight

Trust me, it's on sight.

BattleBots

On Thursday night, in typical fashion, Elon Musk announced vague plans to develop and release a humanoid robot called the "Tesla bot [...] sometime next year."

We've already covered the announcement and how Musk has a horrible track record of overpromising and underdelivering — remember when the underground Loop was supposed to be the superhighway of the future instead of a bumpy taxi ride in a single-lane tunnel? But Insider points out some crucial context about the robot that may or may not someday exist: Notorious AI fearmonger Elon Musk says it'll be designed to be a true lightweight that most people should be able to either defeat in battle — or escape.

Grudge Match

What Musk actually unveiled at Thursday's "AI Day" event was, uh, interesting. The Tesla Bot doesn't exist yet, so he instead dressed up some poor, probably-starving actor dancing around in a unitard.

It's hard to imagine anyone watching the announcement thinking "uh oh, that guy could beat me in a fight," but Musk still reassured the crowd that the real robot would be a diminutive 125 pounds, five-foot-eight, and travel at a max speed of five miles per hour.

"We're setting it such that it is at a mechanical level, at a physical level, you can run away from it and most likely overpower it," Musk said at the event.

"Hopefully that doesn't ever happen," he added. "But you never know."

Of course, since Musk says the robot would operate on Tesla's Autopilot AI algorithms, it's more likely to crash into a wall or randomly stop short while chasing someone down anyway.

READ MORE: Elon Musk says you will probably be able to overpower Tesla's 125-pound humanoid robot [Insider]

More on the Tesla bot: Elon Musk Just Announced a Humanoid “Tesla Bot”