Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk was in Saudi Arabia yesterday. He accompanied President Donald Trump to attend the 2025 Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum.
Musk also gave an interview at the forum, answering questions about the Optimus robot and its future potential, AI, Tesla robotaxis, building tunnels in Saudi Arabia.
As Elon Musk made an appearance on the forum’s stage, Saudi Arabia’s Minister for IT H.E. Abdullah Alswaha told the audience that President Trump and HRH Mohammed Bin Salman just witnessed Optimus robot’s dance.
Video: Elon Musk shares the new dance moves of Optimus humanoid robot (the Tesla CEO is going by the ‘gorklon rust’ moniker these days).
More interestingly, according to Elon Musk, Tesla Optimus performed the signature Trump Dance to the ‘YMCA ‘ as well. However, this specific dance was not publicly shown.
“We just showed several of our Tesla Optimus robots to His Highness and President Trump, and I think they were very impressed,” Musk said in the opening remarks of his interview. “In fact, one of our robots did the Trump dance, which I think was pretty cool”.
Tesla and Musk shared the latest videos of numerous other dance moves that Optimus is able to perform without a hassle now.
Musk also shared his thoughts on how humanoid robots like Tesla Optimus will have a great impact on the future of humanity. He said:
I think we’re headed to a radically different world. I think a good world, an interesting world. My prediction, actually, for humanoid robots is that ultimately there will be tens of billions.
I think everyone will want to have their personal robot. You can think of it like, as though, you had your own personal C3PO or R2D2 or even better. Then, who wouldn’t want to have their own personal C3PO or R2D2—that would be pretty great.
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And, I also think it unlocks an immense amount of economic potential, because when you think about what is the output of an economy? It is productivity per capita times population or capita.
Once you have humanoid robots, the actual amount of economic output potential is tremendous, it’s really unlimited. Potentially, we could have an economy 10 times the size of the current global economy, where no one wants for anything.
Sometimes in AI, they talk about universal basic income, I think it’s gonna be universal high income, where anyone can have any goods or services that they want.
Elon Musk recommended reading the Culture novel book series by Iain Banks to get a grasp of the robotics and AI future that he envisions. Musk is an advocate of a utopian future with all the latest technologies emerging. However, he clarified that if something goes wrong with AI, we could face a dystopian future.
Saudi Arabia is moving fast ahead to diversify its economy. For decades, it has been an oil-based economy, now the Kingdom wants to
🚨 BREAKING: Elon Musk's Full Interview from the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum today. pic.twitter.com/6Yyt34vBKP
The dance moves that Optimus robot is seen doing in the latest videos are nothing short of extraordinary for a physical robot made of metal. When this video was shared on various video streaming and social media platforms, many users denied that this was actually a real robot. Audiences thought that this was done using CGI or generative AI.
To counter this confusion, Musk announced on X that he will bring a troupe of Optimus bots to the next Tesla Shareholder Meeting to demonstrate their newly-gained abilities.
Author of more than 1500 articles on Tesla, SpaceX, and EVs. His work has been liked and tweeted by Elon Musk and other prominent influencers. You can reach him on Twitter @IqtidarAlii
 CEO Elon Musk shares new videos of the company's Optimus humanoid robot dancing. At the 2025 Saudi-US Investment Forum, he talks about its future, more.){kind=link}