Elon Musk took a break from roiling Twitter's stock on Wednesday to address shareholders of his own public company, Tesla, which just posted smashingly successful results for the first quarter. During the teleconference, the billionaire touched on Tesla's plan to develop a humanoid assistant robot called Optimus that he thinks could become the carmaker's most successful innovation. “I was surprised that people did not realize the magnitude of the Optimus robot program,” he said, referring to earlier allusions to the project. “Those who are insightful or listen carefully will understand that Optimus ultimately will be worth more than the car business.” Musk is separately working to develop brain-implant devices at another one of his companies, Neuralink, with the initial ambition of alleviating certain medical ailments—though some spectators have posited that the technology could ultimately be used to fuse human brains with artificial intelligence, in effect turning every person into a humanoid.
