Sci-Fi Filmmaker Mocks Elon Musk’s Robots: ‘Can I Have My Designs Back?’

The director of the science fiction movie I, Robot, has weighed in on Elon Musk’s recently unveiled robot and vehicle designs.
Australian filmmaker Alex Proyas posted a series of photos on X, formerly Twitter, on October 13 showing the designs of Tesla’s Optimus Robot, Robotaxi, and Robovan next to stills from the movie that showed the fuctional robots and vehicles used.
He wrote, “Hey Elon, Can I have my designs back please?”
Proyas’ comments came after Tesla hosted an event titled “We Robot” on October 10, where the Tesla boss unveiled his new robotic creations.
The post received 5.5 million views and 124,000 likes.
Not only did the title of the event seem to lean on Proyas’ movie name, but members of the audience at the event and social media users noticed that the Optimus robots bore a resemblance to Sonny, the fictional robot protagonist from the 2004 movie.
The humanoids in Proyas’ film, set in 2035, were able to assist humans with everyday tasks, like Musk’s Optimus bots, which he said could interpret instructions like, “Pick up that bolt, attach it to the car with that wrench,” in order to help with household chores.
Users also commented on the similarities in the vehicle designs, noting the Robovan looked like the USR Robot Transport in I, Robot.
One user wrote that Musk had “brought sci-fi to our streets with Tesla’s latest, turning a cinematic dream into our new reality.”
Aside from the resemblance to the I, Robot transport, the aesthetic of the designs was hotly debated on X. Some suggested the Robovan’s design wasn’t much of an improvement over that of a computer mouse or a toaster, while others saw it as revolutionary, comparing it to Mercury trains from the late 1930s.
Despite the social media hype around the new Tesla products, the company’s stock dropped 7.8 percent the day after their launch, with one expert calling the event “underwhelming and stunningly absent on detail.”
Proyas is the director of a number of other science fiction films, including The Crow, Dark City, and Knowing.
I, Robot, which starred Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, and Bruce Greenwood, with Alan Tudyk playing the main robot Sonny, accumulated $348,629,585 in worldwide box office sales, according to the film industry website The Numbers. It was adapted from the Isaac Asimov book of the same name.
Do you have a story Newsweek should be covering? Do you have any questions about this story? Contact [email protected].