On December 28, Musk responded in a social media post that it was “truly shameful” for the media to dig up the injuries caused by Kuka Industrial robots (found in all factories) two years ago and make misleading innuendo.
This robot is not that robot
According to the reference news, the British “Daily Mail” website reported on December 26 that in the factory near the capital of Texas, Tesla Motors Co., a brutal and bloody accident occurred, and an engineer was attacked by a robot.
Two witnesses were horrified to see their colleagues attacked by a robot designed to grab and move newly minted aluminum car parts, according to the report.
The engineer was writing software programs for two malfunctioning Tesla robots nearby when the robot suddenly pinned him down and then extended its metal claws toward the engineer’s back and arms, leaving a “trail of blood” on the factory floor.
The incident left the victim with an “open wound” on his left hand. The incident was disclosed in a work-related injury report Tesla filed with Travis County and federal regulators, which was reviewed by DailyMail.com.
In reporting the robot’s “wounding incident,” the British Daily Mail’s report used footage of Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus. Many netizens thought that the factory injury incident was the injury of Optimus.
In order to avoid the impact of the long-planned humanoid robot Optimus, which has not yet been launched, Musk urgently refuted the rumors on social software.

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It is understood that the Kuka robot that Musk said is also known as the robot arm, which is widely used in the field of industrial automation manufacturing, especially in automobile factories. For example, in the body welding process, automated robotic arms can easily lift metal body parts and align them accurately to complete welding compared to manual operations. In the car paint spraying process, there are also a large number of industrial robot applications, compared with manual, robots can more evenly and quickly complete the paint spraying, but also greatly reduce the harm caused by harmful gases to workers’ health.
Industrial robots hurt people should pay attention
However, industrial robots are “strong” and need to run according to programming, and once program errors or misoperations occur, they will cause harm to workers. With the popularization of production automation in the field of industrial manufacturing, robot injury incidents have also begun to increase.
According to a November report by Red Star News, a man in his 40s in South Korea was “killed” by a robot that misjudged him for a box of bell peppers while checking a robot sensor at an agricultural distribution center. This is not the first time a robot has hurt people in South Korea this year. In March, a South Korean man in his 50s was seriously injured when he was trapped by a robot while working at an auto parts factory.
The highly efficient production of Tesla factory also has robot injury incidents, according to the US technology media The Information, sources said that the two-year rapid construction of Tesla’s super factory in Texas made the factory’s safety awareness lax, resulting in an increase in the number of injuries. Tesla’s report also revealed a variety of injuries, including blunt force trauma or chemical burns. In August 2022, an employee caught his ankle on a moving cart, leaving him unable to work for more than four months. Soon after, another material handler was hit in the head by a metal object and rested for 85 days.