Tesla offers Musk $1 trillion pay raise

PLUS: Patients control AI and robotics with thought

Jennifer Mossalgue

September 8, 2025

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Tesla is dangling a jaw-dropping trillion-dollar pay package to keep Elon Musk in the driver’s seat — but the road ahead isn’t about cars.

Musk says Tesla’s future isn’t electric vehicles; it’s an army of robots. The big question is, are we seeing the rise of the world’s boldest robotics empire, or just another Muskian mirage?

In today’s robotics rundown:

Tesla offers Musk $1T for robot revolution
UCL and Google DeepMind’s RobotBallet
Alibaba-backed X Square nabs $100M
Bubble-powered bots could replace needles
Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

TESLA

🤑 Tesla offers Musk $1T for robot revolution

Image source: Molly Riley/Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: Tesla’s board just crafted a pay package that could make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, but only if he delivers on some staggering milestones, including mass-producing a million robotaxis and a million Optimus humanoids.

The details:

Tesla’s regulatory filing details a pay package split into 12 share tranches, granting Musk awards only if he hits milestones within set timelines.
To unlock the payout, Tesla must hit a $2T market valuation and deliver 20M vehicles early on; a steep climb since Tesla delivered under 2M cars last year.
Musk, already the world’s wealthiest person, must stay with Tesla for at least seven-and-a-half years to unlock any stock from the package.
The package is slated for a shareholder vote at Tesla’s annual meeting on November 6.

Why it matters: Musk claims humanoids could one day make up 80% of Tesla’s value, recasting the EV giant as a robotics powerhouse. Tesla’s stock may have wobbled, but the board seems undeterred, approving a share-only pay package as audacious as the moonshot it’s meant to fuel.

UCL/GOOGLE DEEPMIND

🩰 UCL and Google DeepMind’s RoboBallet

Image source: UCL

The Rundown: A joint team from the University College of London (UCL), Google DeepMind, and Alphabet-owned Intrinsic unveiled RoboBallet, a groundbreaking AI algorithm that enables fleets of robotic arms to move in concert across factory floors.

The details:

RoboBallet uses graph neural networks and reinforcement learning to coordinate robotic arms, treating each robot and object as nodes in a network.
It lets teams of robots plan synchronized movements and task assignments in seconds rather than hours, far surpassing manual programming approaches.
UCL says the system avoids collisions and optimizes each robot's path and timing for harmony across the workspace.
The algorithm supports scalability, handling up to eight arms and 40 tasks, with plans generated hundreds of times faster than real time.

Why it matters: This leap in robotic coordination brings manufacturers a new level of flexibility, replacing tedious manual programming with real-time automation, enabling lines to reconfigure and respond to change with minimal downtime. The goal: factory layouts evolve faster, production agility rises, and the process becomes more adaptive.

X SQUARE ROBOT

🤖 Alibaba-backed X Square nabs $100M

Image source: X Square Robot

The Rundown: China’s X Square Robot just snagged another $100M to chase its vision of putting robots in homes before Tesla and Figure. Backed by Alibaba Cloud, the Shenzhen startup has raised $280M in under two years.

The details:

The startup recently unveiled Wall-OSS, an open-source embodied AI foundation model, claimed to be the first specifically for robotics.
Its newly unveiled Quanta X2 robot features mop-head attachments for 360-degree cleaning and dexterous hands capable of sensing subtle pressure shifts.
X Square Robot projects that “robotic butlers” could be a practical reality within five years.
But unlike Unitree, the company currently has no mass-market product, and pricing will vary depending on each robot’s use case.

Why it matters: X Square Robot aims to make humanoids more accessible and plans to cut costs to $10K within five years. Plus, the speed of its fundraising is a sign of just how hot humanoids have become, with Chinese startups increasingly challenging Tesla, Agility Robotics, and 1X in the robotics race.

ROBOT RESEARCH

🫧 Bubble-powered bots could replace needles

Image source: Ideogram/The Rundown

The Rundown: Forget rockets or rotors — the next leap in robotics might ride on bubbles. A U.S.–Chinese team has turned cavitation, or the violent collapse of liquid bubbles, into tiny, high-flying robots capable of piercing the skin barrier.

The details:

The microbots, dubbed “jumpers,” harness cavitation energy to leap nearly five feet, all without bulky external power sources.
Detailed in Science, the system transforms a chaotic fluid effect into a built-in propulsion engine.
Potential applications include needle-free drug delivery, allowing microbots to pierce tissue and deliver medicine directly where needed.
Beyond medicine, they could benefit industrial processes and micro-scale exploration of space.

Why it matters: Currently in early stages, this project turns a destructive natural phenomenon into a controllable engine for micro-robots. By enabling precise movement at microscopic scales without needles or machinery, it could unlock safer medical treatments and entirely new ways to explore environments humans can’t reach.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Uber and Momenta, a Chinese autonomous driving startup, will begin testing Level 4 robotaxis in Munich in 2026, their first public launch in continental Europe.

Agility Robotics built a whole-body control foundation model for its humanoid, Digit, which works as a "motor cortex" to coordinate safe, stable movement.

Detroit-based Borg Robotics released the first-ever demo of its fully autonomous wheeled humanoid, Borg 01.

NexLawn, a Dreame sub-brand, unveiled the Master X Series Concept at IFA 2025 in Berlin, billed as the first robotic mower with a fully functional mechanical arm.

SwitchBot launched a pair of soft-bodied companion robots, Noa and Niko, which use AI to recognize family members, express emotions, and learn routines.

NOAA deployed five small C-Star uncrewed surface vehicles off the U.S. Virgin Islands to gather real-time ocean data to improve hurricane research and forecasting.

Eufy’s new MarsWalker uses four robotic arms and a drive-track system to autonomously carry a docked robot vacuum up and down stairs.

Washington State University researchers developed a robot that uses soft silicone grippers and a fan to detect and gently pick strawberries in dense foliage.

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