Tesla Optimus vs Boston Dynamics Atlas: one has a spec sheet, one has a price

Atlas has a published spec sheet and no price. Optimus has a published price and no spec sheet. Neither robot can be bought by a member of the public at any number, and the useful thing about Tesla Optimus vs Boston Dynamics is that the two companies withhold completely different information.

Boston Dynamics will tell you what its robot weighs, how many joints it has, how cold a room it survives and which customers get the 2026 units. It will not tell you what one costs. Tesla will tell you what Optimus should eventually cost and how many a factory could build per year, and nothing at all about the height, weight or runtime of the version it is tooling for, because that version has not been shown.

The spec sheets, side by side

	Boston Dynamics Atlas	Tesla Optimus
Height	1.9 m (6.2 ft)	5 ft 8 in (1.73 m)
Weight	90 kg (198 lb)	57 kg (125 lb)
Lift	50 kg (110 lb) instant, 30 kg (66 lb) sustained	45 lb (20 kg) carry
Reach	2.3 m (7.5 ft)	not published
Degrees of freedom	56, fully rotational joints	hands only: 11 in 2023, 22 in 2024; no whole-body figure
Battery	4 hours, walks to a dock and swaps its own	not published
Walk speed	not published	not published
Environment	IP67, -20 to 40 C	not published
Control modes	autonomous, teleoperated, or tablet	not published
Generation publicly detailed	production Atlas, unveiled January 5, 2026	v2.3, shown December 2025; V3 unrevealed
Price	none, ever	none; $20,000 to $30,000 named as a target
Order path	sales form, factory buyers	no order channel exists

Atlas fills ten of those twelve rows, from its own spec panel and the January 5, 2026 unveiling post.

Optimus fills four, and three of the four describe a machine older than the one Tesla is building. Those come from Optimus's Wikipedia entry, because tesla.com/optimus again returned HTTP 403 to an automated check.

On the raw ratio the two machines are in the same class, each carrying about a third of its own mass. Only one of those payload figures has an IP rating printed beside it.

Two kinds of famous

The Atlas everyone pictures is retired. Backflips on November 16, 2017, a gymnastics floor routine on September 24, 2019, the dancing video on December 29, 2020: all of that was the hydraulic machine, and Boston Dynamics retired it on April 16, 2024, announcing the all-electric replacement the following day. The parkour robot is a museum piece with a YouTube afterlife.

Optimus became famous in the opposite direction. Tesla announced it on August 19, 2021, thirteen months before a prototype walked on stage at the second AI Day in September 2022. Generation 2 landed in a December 2023 video. Then the October 2024 "We, Robot" event, where the robots working the crowd turned out to be running largely on teleoperation and Tesla had not said so up front.

So the fandom on both sides is arguing about footage. One camp is defending a machine that no longer exists, the other a machine that was partly a person with a controller.

Where each robot actually is this month

Boston Dynamics said on January 5, 2026 that it would "begin production of the new Atlas robots at its Boston headquarters immediately," and that "all Atlas deployments are already fully committed for 2026, with fleets scheduled to ship to Hyundai's Robotics Metaplant Application Center (RMAC) and Google DeepMind in the coming months." Additional customers were slated for early 2027. DeepMind is on that list because of the AI partnership announced the same day, which puts Gemini Robotics models on Atlas, automotive work first.

Two public outings since: the CES reveal itself, staged inside Hyundai's global media day presentation on January 5, and halftime of the Norway vs Brazil World Cup round of 16 on July 5, 2026, where Atlas handed the ceremonial match ball to the referee at the New York New Jersey Stadium. That post also mentions "our first Atlas deployment at the Hyundai Metaplant last year," which puts a real robot in a real Hyundai building in 2025.

Tesla's January 28, 2026 update was Musk saying Optimus is "still in the R&D phase" and not in use in Tesla's factories "in a material way," against a January 2025 claim that several thousand would be doing useful things by the end of that year. On the April 22, 2026 earnings call, Fremont production was pencilled in for late July or August, with V3 to be unveiled closer to production start, and on July 2 Musk said output will be extremely slow at first.

That window is open right now, and no build count, V3 spec sheet or start-of-production confirmation has appeared. Neither, for the record, has Boston Dynamics ever published a cumulative Atlas count, and its own June 24, 2026 facilities release still describes Atlas as "our electric humanoid platform currently in development."

Teleoperation is a line item on one of these spec sheets

Boston Dynamics lists Atlas's three control modes in its own launch copy: autonomous, teleoperated, or driven from a tablet. Remote operation is a shipped feature, printed by the manufacturer, and Wikipedia's Atlas entry, citing AP's report from the show, describes the CES demonstration as remotely controlled.

Tesla has published nothing comparable. On the two occasions teleoperation became the story, We Robot in 2024 and the water-bottle demos referenced in that January 2026 report, outsiders worked it out afterward.

Printing "teleoperated" as a mode does not make Atlas an autonomous robot. It makes the question answerable, which is more than this category usually manages. The general version is in how autonomous humanoid robots actually are, and the same gap runs through Figure versus Tesla.

The money buys two different buildings

Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 as an MIT spin-off, runs around 1,000 employees, and has been roughly 80 percent owned by Hyundai since the approximately $880 million deal completed in June 2021. Its 2026 capital announcement is a 323,000 square foot robotics center in Waltham: 1,250 new jobs by 2033, phased occupancy from mid-2027.

Tesla's numbers are three orders of magnitude up and one degree less real: a Fremont line described as designed for a million robots a year, a Gigafactory Texas line at ten million a year from 2027, a figure Optimus lead Ashok Elluswamy corrected upward on July 30, 2026 with the words "Correction, 10 million robots." Musk's cost projection at a million units a year has been reported at $20,000 to $25,000 each.

Ten million humanoids a year would outsell new cars in most countries on earth. One company is hiring 1,250 people over seven years, the other is quoting a capacity figure with eight digits in it, and only one of them has robots committed to named customers this calendar year.

Neither of these is a thing you can buy

Atlas routes to a form. The Atlas contact page is headed "Your path to the factory of the future" and says the company "will be starting with a select number of early adopters." The full price situation, including the fact that the only Atlas with a public number on it is a t-shirt, is in Atlas is not for sale.

Optimus has no form to fill in. Our Optimus tracker entry files the $20,000 to $30,000 figure as a claim rather than a price, because a price is something you can pay. The machines that will actually take your money this month are over here, and none of them are these two.

If you want a date to put in a calendar, there is exactly one. Wikipedia's Atlas entry, citing AP's January 5, 2026 report from CES, has the automobile-assembly version of Atlas scheduled for Hyundai's HMGMA plant in 2028. Tesla has published no equivalent date for a specific robot in a specific building. Between a humanoid whose famous footage came from a machine retired in 2024 and a humanoid famous for a price nobody has ever been allowed to pay, that 2028 line is the only entry on either calendar with a customer's name on it.