# Optimus hands are the hardest part to build at scale Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/optimus-hands-are-the-hardest-part-to-build-at-scale/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. - Speaker: [Elon Musk](https://realalpha.app/builders/elon-musk/) · Elon Musk is a Tesla CEO. - Host: [Chamath Palihapitiya](https://realalpha.app/people/chamath-palihapitiya/) · Founder & CEO, Social Capital · Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq. - Host: [Jason Calacanis](https://realalpha.app/people/jason-calacanis/) · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH · Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups. - Host: [David Sacks](https://realalpha.app/people/david-sacks/) · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures · PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26. - Host: [David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/people/david-friedberg/) · CEO, Ohalo · Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013. - Show: All-In - Episode: [Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/), Sep 10, 2025 - Moment: 2:57 to 10:28 of the episode (8 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/optimus-hands-are-the-hardest-part-to-build-at-scale/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=177 ## Quote > “we've had to design every electric motor gearbox and the controlling electronics **from scratch, basically from physics** first principles” > — [Elon Musk](https://realalpha.app/builders/elon-musk/) at [9:06](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=546) · All-In ## Takeaways 1. The humanoid robot supply chain has to be built from scratch. 2. Each arm has 26 actuators, and the hand is the hardest design problem. 3. Musk estimates $20,000–$25,000 production cost at one million units a year. ## About this segment Optimus needs a bespoke actuator supply chain, and its hands account for most of the engineering difficulty. Elon Musk estimates production cost near $20,000 at a million units per year. From “Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding”, Sep 10, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/) ## Transcript Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [3:02](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=182) progress like and how much of your how many of your cycles are going specifically to optimus what's the timeline i think you're on version three maybe four tell us everything uh well yeah i know everything would take a long time we've got time um we're we're finalizing the design of optimus version 3 and uh that really is going to be a very remarkable robot it will have the essentially the manual dexterity of a human so meaning a very complex hand and the a an AI mind that can navigate and comprehend reality and we made in very high volume those are the three things that are missing like if you see any other A robotics company, they're missing those three things. Those are the three really hard things. And I spent actually at this point, it might be more of my mental cycles than anything else, any other single thing, on Optimus. [4:26](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=266) that's solving for real-world AI, all of the electromechanical issues of Optimus, the supply chain and production challenges of it, because there is no supply chain that exists for humanoid robots. So we have to recreate it from scratch, which requires doing a lot of vertical integration. um none of the actuators in optimus um are available from an existing supply chain um so but i i think it is accurate to say that if successful optimus will be the biggest product ever and the cost of it at scale 20 30 40 000 a robot what do you think the first wave of them will cost, and when will we be able to buy one to work on the ranch? [5:23](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=323) I think that the marginal cost of production, once you hit a million units per year, is probably around the $20,000 range. It sort of depends on how much you spend on the AI chip in the robot. and you need to achieve a lot of efficiencies in the actuators there are 26 actuators per arm like 26 electric like motors gearboxes and power electronics so so but the the the AI chip will be pretty expensive it like that that might be like five five or six thousand dollars of the of the bill of materials maybe more um and um but but so i but i think at volume at a million units a year the the production cost is probably on the order of twenty thousand dollars maybe 25 something like that and um the price will be as a function of demand ilan um can you maybe explain to everybody why the hand is so important to get [6:38](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=398) right and why you know the actuator design is so unique and you know why it's so difficult why nobody makes it and why you have to start there almost to build the rest of the the robot properly well it turns out the human hands are incredibly that they've evolved to this to be this incredibly sophisticated machine like the your hand is an actually a remarkable thing it's look look closely at your hands and think of all the things you can do with your hands, which is a lot. [7:12](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=432) I can think of many things. Yeah, I was just thinking about something. You know, your hand's a very versatile instrument. Yeah. You can give him a high five. Very versatile. You know, you can swing a baseball bat. You can thread needles. You can put thread in a needle. you can play the piano with violin you know you could disassemble or assemble a car the hands are incredibly versatile instruments and most of the muscles of the hand are actually in the forearm so your hand is kind of like a like a like it's like a puppet like it's mostly a puppet the muscle the muscles are coming from the forearm and the pulling the tendons uh which are you know also human tendon designing or human tendon evolution is incredibly good um so you've got this web of tendons you've you've got um i think i think [8:16](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=496) the human hand is something like depending on how you count it 27 or 28 degrees of freedom in the hand, it's amazing. So in order to create a robot that can be a generalized humanoid, you must solve the hands problem. Yeah, we had Aria. It's got hands, knees hands. And so is it like when you were first building Tesla where the supply chain doesn't exist and now you have to go out and find folks to work with and, you know, build all this vertical integration, get support? [8:52](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=532) Is it literally like it's just nowhere to be found and you're going to have to build all of this stuff up? Yes. We could not actually buy the actuators for any amount of money. They simply didn't exist. Even though there are, I don't know, 10,000, 20,000 electric motors out there of various sizes and shapes, we've had to design every electric motor gearbox and the controlling electronics from scratch, basically from physics first principles the good news is you've got a lot of experience with factories over the last couple of decades so yeah how challenging is this versus cybertruck model y model gigafactory you know the yeah the fabergé egg known as the model x yeah right um it's harder than any of those things okay yeah much harder Significantly, yeah. [9:49](https://realalpha.app/v/qeZqZBRA-6Q/?t=589) Yes. Harder than Starship? No, not hard. Starship's harder. Okay. So somewhere between a Model X and a Starship. Yeah. What's harder, the hardware or the software? Right now we're struggling with the final design of the hardware. Like I said, it's really primarily the hand. And not to just dismiss the rest of the robot, the rest of it's also important, but the hands are, the hands inclusive of the forearm are a majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot.