Tesla: Pay no attention to the terrible headlines. Check out this dancing robot!

Tesla news these days is pretty much only bad news.

A few recent headlines include:

• Disappearing EV credits

• Declining sales

• A bad start to Q2 based on monthly reports from around the world

• Shrinking demand as evidenced by a week-long labor pause and confirmation from Tesla employees themselves

• A report that the company hasn’t even begun testing driverless robotaxis that it’s supposed to roll out to the public in a few weeks

Yet the stock has risen 23% in the last week and 35% in the last month.

A number of outlets have speculated that the latest rise may have something to do with the China trade deal, but as we’ve written, that shouldn’t affect Tesla much. Perhaps the real reason for investor optimism is coming from something more fun... like Tesla’s dancing robot, Optimus.

In the past few days, Tesla has been posting a series of videos showing its humanoid robot dancing over what sounds like the techno music Tesla plays on its earnings calls. In an earlier video, it’s attached to a cable (likely to catch it if it falls), but in a video posted last night, it’s not:

In a retweet of the dancing robot post, the Tesla account jokes: “We’re a car company right.”

The statement is a nod to CEO Elon Musk’s repeated assertions that autonomous humanoid robots like Optimus are the key to his company’s future and the reason for its sky-high valuation. In other words: don’t focus on our struggling car business because we’re not a car business. After all, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood said that there’s a "$26 trillion revenue opportunity" in humanoid robots and Tesla is well-positioned to succeed there!

But perhaps, like at Tesla’s Cybercab event last fall, not everything is as it seems. Then, the Optimus bots pouring drinks and chatting up attendees turned out to be remotely operated. This time, the robot’s performance also might be less impressive than at first glance.

“What’s not shown is the human operator whose movements the robot is copying. This setup is called whole body teleoperation,” a well-regarded Tesla analyst who goes by the name Troy Teslike said, linking to two videos to support his claim. “The movements don’t need to happen simultaneously. Once the robot learns them, it can repeat them exactly later.”

He added:

“In short, Optimus can copy human movements without falling over, but that doesn’t mean it has the sensors or balance to do similar movements on its own without exactly replicating a human. So, the technology is still far from being useful in a home setting.”