The past year has featured many companies claiming they’re on the cusp of delivering humanoid robots. Of course, what they’ve shown us so far has been mostly terrible and useless, but people can’t help but imagine what their world would be like if they had robots around them at all times.

Wait, actually, what *would* we need all those robots for? It’s a question that these “innovators” haven’t really been able to answer. Sure, they can cook and clean, but that doesn’t take that long — what’s my robot going to be doing for the rest of the day?

According to Elon Musk, the answer to that question is “stopping crime.”

At a recent shareholders meeting, Musk discussed his idea of a future in which Tesla’s Optimus robots prevent crime by following people around and telling them not to do it.

“You now get a free Optimus, and it's just going to follow you around and stop you from doing crime. Other than that, you get to do anything; it's just going to stop you from committing crime,” he explained. “That's really it. You don't have to put people in prisons and stuff.”

While we applaud his idea that shoving people into prisons forever is bad, I don’t think “free robot that tells you ‘no’” is the solution to carjackings. What’s the robot going to do, run after the car?

Elon Musk: With Optimus, we might be able to stop putting people in prison.

“If somebody's committed a crime, we might be able to provide a more humane form of containment of future crime. You now get a free Optimus, and it's just going to follow you around and stop you from… pic.twitter.com/Y8E2ToyNkd

— ELON CLIPS (@ElonClipsX) November 10, 2025