Elon Musk brought a 'Terminator' warning to Davos

Elon Musk finally showed up at Davos, but for a first-time cameo, his appearance played like a rerun. In a room that thrives on novelty, he delivered a familiar trilogy — robots for everyone, self-driving on the verge, and AI sprinting toward superhuman intelligence — leaving one lingering question hanging over the lanyards: What exactly was the point of this trip?

Well, Musk’s Davos appearance offered one clear, checkable (if already mentioned) thing: dates. 

He said Tesla $TSLA aims to get “Supervised Full Self-Driving approval in Europe, hopefully next month, and then maybe a similar timing [...] for China,” a line that helped push Tesla shares up more than 3% after his appearance. He talked about robotaxis spreading (far more slowly than promised) across the U.S. this year, and he insisted humanoid robots will be for sale to the public by the end of next year — with the rest of the session functioning as elevator music for a future he’s been narrating ad nauseam.

“There will be more robots than people,” he said, promising machines that “saturate all human needs.” He told Davos to brace for “amazing abundance” and joked about avoiding an outcome like James Cameron's “Terminator. 

“We need to be very careful with AI,” Musk said. “We need to be very careful with robotics. We don’t want to find ourselves in a James Cameron movie — you know, ‘Terminator.’” Even in an optimism-forward pitch, Musk couldn't resist echoing warnings about machinery getting ahead of the rules. (He’s been invoking “Terminator”-style outcomes for years.)

But the bigger tell was what wasn’t there: no new reveal, no new partnership, no grand, Davos-exclusive pledge — just a sales pitch for the permit-and-capital class; Tesla’s story is en route, Musk says, and the future he keeps predicting still requires regulators to approve it, grids to feed it, and investors to keep financing the waiting. Davos is where the people who write the rules sit near the people who bankroll the infrastructure, and they both want to hear the same thing: that the future is inevitable, orderly, and investable.

Musk and BlackRock $BLK CEO Larry Fink arrived onstage to muted applause. “That was not a large applause. Start again,” Fink told the audience. Musk then opened with a joke about geopolitics that made the room sound like it had already spent the day laughing at better lines. “I heard about the formation of the peace summit,” he said, joking — to a quiet room — about whether it was “peace” or “piece.” He said, “A little piece of Greenland. A little piece of Venezuela.” He later reached for two of his safest crowd-pleasers: “People ask me do I want to die on Mars, and I’m like ‘Yes, but not on impact,’” and — on aliens — “I say, I am one, but they don’t believe me.”

But his closer leaned hard into mood management. “I would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future,” he said. He followed it with a line that played well in a room built on optimistic forecasts: “For quality of life, it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than being a pessimist and right.” 

His performance had the tone of an earnings-call afterparty — loose jokes up top, sweeping inevitability in the middle, and big promises delivered with the casual confidence of a man who has never met a deadline he couldn’t outrun with a bigger one. The point of showing up looked less like novelty than positioning: a personal reminder, delivered in person, to the regulators, financiers, and infrastructure people who can make “next month” and “next year” real.

A familiar finish line, with a fresh calendar

At Davos, Musk framed autonomy the way he usually does: not as a messy engineering project but with a finish line already in sight. “I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point,” he said, then returned to the two-part promise he’s been making for years — first a controlled rollout, then inevitability. He said Tesla has rolled out robotaxi service “in a few cities,” and predicted it would be “very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S.,” another familiar Musk timeline presented as an update. 

Musk has spent a decade turning autonomy into a perpetual next-year story. In 2019, he predicted Tesla would have more than a million robotaxis on the road “next year for sure,” and in 2020, he told investors he was “very confident” Full Self-Driving functionality would be “complete by the end of this year,” because he was “literally driving it.” Since then, the promise has kept mutating — “paid rides next year,” “unsupervised next year,” “widespread by the end of the year” — while the hard part stays the same: Autonomy isn’t a finish line you cross once; it’s a system you have to convince regulators, insurers, and the public to tolerate at scale.

By 2025, the “next year for sure” language had become its own recurring character. Now, in 2026 at Davos, that calendar language — “hopefully next month” — is aimed squarely at European regulators.

Optimus gets a sales date

For Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, Musk offered an assembly-line progression that reads like a product roadmap written in calendar years. “Humanoid robotics will advance very quickly,” he said, adding that Tesla already has some Optimus robots “doing simple tasks in the factory.” By the end of this year, he predicted they’d be doing more complex tasks — still industrial, still controlled. Then the big consumer promise: “By the end of next year, I think we’ll be selling humanoid robots to the public,” timed to when Tesla feels confident about safety, liability, and functionality.

Musk’s timelines are never just forecasts; they’re a way of turning belief into momentum. Davos attendees are fluent in the language of “by the end of next year” because it sounds close enough to model — and far enough away to forgive. His humanoid line is the kind of line Davos loves, because it turns messy problems — labor shortages, stagnant productivity, etc. — into a supply forecast. 

And he gave the audience the domestic hook that makes humanoids feel less like sci-fi and more like a solution dressed up in destiny: “Who wouldn’t want a robot to, assuming it’s very safe, watch over your kids, take care of your pets?”

The pitch is utopian, but it’s built on a premise that’s almost grimly practical: care is expensive, and demographic math is not getting kinder. Musk framed the humanoid boom as a solution to aging societies that are running out of young workers to do the hands-on parts of life. That’s the kind of argument Davos understands instinctively — a future where the shortage is not demand, but bodies.

Musk’s fastest timeline hits the slowest constraint

And then Musk hit the audience with AI acceleration claims — the kind that always land like a fire alarm, even with repetition. “The rate at which AI is progressing, I think we might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year,” he said, adding, “no later than the end of next year.” And then: “Five years from now, AI will be smarter than all of humanity — collectively.”

He paired the awe with abundance: “If we have ubiquitous AI, which is essentially free or close to it, and ubiquitous robotics, then you will have an explosion in the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent.” He also used the session to frame his companies as almost-civic projects — optimizing for “civilization” and expanding “consciousness” beyond Earth — a SpaceX-inflected way of making Mars sound less like a billionaire hobby and more like a mission statement.

Then came the part where prophecy turns into permitting. Musk argued that AI’s limiting factor is no longer just chips — it’s “fundamentally electrical power,” he said, claiming that we're getting close to a world where “we’ll be producing more chips than we can turn on.” Musk said a 100-mile-by-100-mile patch of solar could power the entire U.S., a line he’s echoed elsewhere, before he swerved into policy: “Unfortunately, in the U.S., the tariff barriers for solar (panels) are extremely high,” he said. “And that makes the economics of deploying solar artificially high, because China makes almost all the solar and the tech.” His case is less a climate sermon than an infrastructure argument; AI, robots, and autonomy are presented as destiny, while power generation is the bottleneck that decides whether that destiny ships on time.

AI is the part where Musk’s prophecy starts behaving like brand maintenance. If the robot story is about manufacturing and scale, the AI story is about awe, and awe is a useful currency when a company is trying to persuade investors and regulators that the future will arrive on its — and its CEO’s — schedule.

The Tesla and SpaceX and xAI CEO has somehow managed to turn prediction into a business line. He can show up, say the same big numbers with the same calm certainty, and then hand the bill to everyone else: regulators who have to decide what “safe enough” means, utilities that have to deliver the power, and investors who have to finance the lag between promise and reality. Davos, with its handshakes and urgency cosplay, is basically built for that handoff. The Davos crowd might not have given him applause, but it could give him the thing he really needs: attention from the people who can approve, fund, and energize his timetables.