Figure AI vs Tesla Optimus: the dated comparison

Neither robot is for sale. No price, no order page, no waitlist, for either one. Every Figure AI vs Tesla Optimus comparison starts there, because what separates the two is how much each company will tell you.

Figure publishes a spec sheet, a build count, a production rate and a named customer with an arrival date. Tesla publishes capacity targets and a price never attached to a purchasable product. Both say the robot is eventually going in your house.

The spec sheet, side by side

	Figure 03	Tesla Optimus
Height	5 ft 8 in	5 ft 8 in (173 cm)
Weight	61 kg (134 lb)	57 kg (125 lb)
Payload / carry	20 kg (44 lb)	45 lb (20 kg)
Runtime	5 hours	not published
Walk speed	1.2 m/s (about 2.7 mph)	not published
Hands	fingertip sensors detect forces as small as three grams; joint count not published	22 degrees of freedom in the hands shown in 2024, up from 11 in 2023
Charging	2 kW wireless, coils in the feet	not published
Latest generation publicly detailed	Figure 03, announced October 9, 2025	v2.3, shown in public December 2025; V3 unrevealed
Consumer price	none stated anywhere	none; $20,000 to $30,000 named as a target at scale

Figure's column comes from its own Figure 03 product page, plus the October 9, 2025 announcement post for the hands and charging. Tesla's column is harder to assemble, and that is the finding. tesla.com/optimus refuses automated checks, and Tesla has published no spec sheet for the generation it is tooling for now. The height, weight and carry figures belong to the generation Tesla has actually demonstrated, as collected on Optimus's Wikipedia entry. On the April 22, 2026 earnings call Musk said V3 would be unveiled closer to production start, which is why half that column reads "not published."

Figure fills seven of those nine rows with a number. Tesla fills four, and every one of the four describes a generation older than the one it is currently building.

The dated record

Date	Company	What happened
Sep 16, 2025	Figure	More than $1B in Series C closed at a $39B post-money valuation
Oct 9, 2025	Figure	Figure 03 introduced; BotQ line stated as capable of up to 12,000 robots a year
Dec 13 and 20, 2025	Tesla	Optimus v2.3 appears in London and Berlin, greeting attendees and handing out popcorn
Jan 27, 2026	Figure	Helix 02: a four-minute autonomous task, 61 loco-manipulation actions, no resets, no human intervention
Jan 28, 2026	Tesla	Musk admits no Optimus robots are doing useful work at Tesla
Apr 22, 2026	Tesla	Fremont line described as designed for 1 million robots a year, Gigafactory Texas for 10 million a year from 2027
Apr 29, 2026	Figure	More than 350 Figure 03s delivered; build rate raised from 1 per day to 1 per hour
May 8, 2026	Figure	Two robots tidy a bedroom and make a bed together in under two minutes, with no central coordinator
Jun 30, 2026	Figure	Figure 03 arrives at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, where the prior generation worked on 30,000 cars in 2025
Jul 2, 2026	Tesla	Musk pushes back on the idea Tesla is secretly further along, saying production will be extremely slow at first (Electrek's Optimus guide)
Jul 31, 2026	Tesla	Optimus lead Ashok Elluswamy corrects a production figure upward to 10 million robots for the Texas line

Unlinked rows trace to the sources cited above. Read the right-hand column by type rather than by company: Figure's entries are mostly things that happened in a building, and Tesla's are mostly things about buildings.

Autonomy is the one gap you can measure

Every claim here is a maker claim, from a company with an incentive. Figure's version is at least checkable, because it is stated as a run length. A four-minute end-to-end task, 61 ordered actions, no resets and no human intervention, published January 27, 2026. A two-robot bedroom tidy in under two minutes, published May 8, 2026, with Figure stating there was no shared planner and no message passing between the machines. Those are numbers a skeptic can hold the footage against.

Tesla has published no equivalent figure. The most-discussed Optimus appearance, October 2024's "We, Robot" event, became a story because the units turned out to be remotely operated without that being stated up front. London and Berlin in December 2025 were popcorn and photographs. Then on January 28, 2026, one day after Figure published its four-minute run, Musk said no Optimus robots were doing useful work at Tesla.

The category-wide version of this problem is in how autonomous are humanoid robots, really. For these two: one company reports run lengths, the other reports floor plans.

Manufacturing: two orders of magnitude, one receipt

Figure's stated ceiling is 12,000 robots a year from BotQ initially, with a goal of 100,000 over four years. Tesla's Fremont line is described as designed for 1 million a year, with Texas at 10 million a year starting 2027, roughly 83 times Figure's initial capacity.

Against that, the count of robots each company has publicly said it has built: Figure, more than 350 by April 29, 2026, alongside a claimed 99.3 percent first-pass yield on its battery line. Tesla, no cumulative number, ever.

A design capacity is a spreadsheet. A build count is a claim you can be caught out on later, which makes the smaller number the more useful one. The wider 2026 ledger is in what actually shipped in 2026.

Price and the home, which are the same question

Figure has never named a price. No store, no order page, no waitlist anywhere on figure.ai, which is why the Figure 03 tracker entry has an empty price field rather than a guess.

Tesla has named a price and never sold at it. The $20,000 to $30,000 figure has been a stated at-scale target since October 10, 2024, and on January 22, 2026 Musk told Davos that Optimus would be sold to the public by the end of next year, meaning the end of 2027, conditional on very high reliability, safety and range of functionality. Six days later came the admission about useful work. Our Optimus tracker entry files that price as a claim, and the slippage record sits in the dated archive of Musk's robot claims.

Both companies aim the marketing at your living room. Figure's product page says Figure 03 handles household tasks the way you would; the one place a Figure 03 verifiably does work is a BMW plant in South Carolina. Tesla's pitch has always included the home, and Tesla's robots have so far mostly distributed popcorn.

Optimus will be amazing for protecting and taking care of your elderly parents. (@elonmusk, 2026-01-23)

Three checkpoints that would change this page

Falsifiable, so you can hold me to them.

1. A Tesla Optimus number. A V3 reveal with published specs, or a cumulative build count. Neither exists eight months into 2026, and the Fremont start was pencilled in for late July or August.
2. A Figure price. Any consumer price, waitlist or order flow. Figure has taken more than $1B at a $39B valuation without naming one, and a company signing enterprise deals like the Catalyst Brands agreement of May 26, 2026 has no commercial need to.
3. An autonomous run that is not Figure's own footage. Everything above about Helix 02 is Figure describing Figure. A third party timing an unbroken multi-minute run in a room Figure did not set up would be the first independent data point here.

Until one of those lands, the summary is that one company is building a documented number of robots for factories while talking about homes, and the other is building factories for robots while talking about homes. The machines you can put money on this week, none of which are these two, are here.