The robot folding a T-shirt is actually controlled by a human.

The South Africa-born American billionaire Elon Musk often boasts about the technological progress at his companies and his latest bragging is about Optimus, a humanoid robot under development at Tesla.

On 15 January, Musk posted a video showing Optimus folding a T-shirt, suggesting that it acts in the autonomous mode. Unsurprisingly, many fans believed that it was real. However, at a closer look, some users observed a gloved human hand moving in and out of the bottom right corner of the video frame.

Unmasked, the entrepreneur admitted in a follow-up post the same day that things are not what they look like: “Important note: Optimus cannot yet do this autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment (won’t require a fixed table with box that has only one shirt).”

When? Musk didn’t say.

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The German publication Deutsche Welle quoted in 2022 several robotics engineers, artificial intelligence experts, and tech enthusiasts as saying that they were disappointed with Optimus. During a robot presentation event, an advanced version of Optimus had to be wheeled to the stage and carried to a small podium where it waved and thrust its knee while a crowd — largely made up of Tesla employees — cheered and roared.

Other media commentators were unimpressed too, calling Optimus “an exaggeration” at best and a “scam project” at worst.

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It’s an embarrassing situation for the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and X (former Twitter), the social media platform where he published the video and which he claims to host “truth only.”

Perhaps Mr. Musk has lied about many other accomplishments, we can’t be sure. But we bet he is pretty angry with the person who filmed the Optimus & T-shirt scene. Is he or she still employed there?

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