Musk lashes out at media for robot attack story

Tech billionaire Elon Musk isn’t happy with how the media covered a 2021 Tesla factory injury report involving a robot that came to light this week.

Mr. Musk took to X, the social media company he owns, on Wednesday to complain about what he saw as misleading reports.

“Truly shameful of the media to dredge up an injury from two years ago due to a simple industrial Kuka robot arm (found in all factories) and imply that it is due to Optimus now,” he wrote. The humanoid Optimus robots, unveiled last year, are designed to perform manual labor.

Many of Mr. Musk‘s fans joined in on attacking the media coverage of the incident. Space enthusiast Andrew McCarthy claimed that using the word “attack” makes little sense when discussing the actions of a robot.

“‘Attacks’ implies it made a decision,” he wrote on X. “That robot did exactly as it was programmed to do.”

The coverage surrounded a recently disclosed injury report from Tesla‘s Giga Texas facility. In 2021, an engineer there was working on a software update for a few robots responsible for carrying aluminum. While the machines were supposed to be turned off during the update, one was not.

The robot pinned the engineer and lashed at his back and arms, leaving him with a gaping wound. Tesla claimed in the report that the employee did not need any time off for recovery.

At the heart of Mr. Musk‘s complaints, apparently, was that many outlets conflated Tesla‘s Optimus bot and the Kuka robot, the latter being the one involved in the 2021 incident. No Optimus bots are operational at Tesla facilities, since the humanoid robots are still under development.

Mr. Musk did not attempt to contradict many of the figures in the media reports that suggest Tesla has a higher injury rate than the rest of the industry.