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Tag: Optimus

  • Tesla Cybercab Crisis: Elon Musk Announces AI5 Chip Delays

    The entire foundation of Elon Musk’s technological empire rests on a tiny chip named AI5, which is set to power Tesla’s Full Self Driving mode, Optimus robots, and data centers. Musk has been talking about the chip for more than a year now, but now the timeline to commercial scale has slipped…significantly.

    Musk first announced that Tesla had “completed design” on the AI5 chip—originally called the Hardware 5 chip—last year at a June 2024 Tesla shareholder meeting, noting that “AI 5, will be in Optimus and in all cars in about 18 months.”

    Well, it’s been almost 18 months. Where’s the chip?

    Still in design review apparently.

    Musk posted on X on November 15 that, “Just wrapped up the AI5 Saturday chip design review a few hours ago. We’re starting to do some work on AI6 too,” adding, “Btw, AI5 will not be available in sufficient volume to switch over Tesla production lines until mid 2027, as we need several hundred thousand completed AI5 boards line side.”

    Mid-2027?

    What the Delay Means for Tesla—and Musk’s Other Companies

    Morningstar notes that, “All of Tesla Inc. depends on making a tiny silicon chip that will power everything from driverless technology to robots.”

    The delay means that major upcoming products, like the Cybercab, the highly anticipated robotaxi planned for 2026, will debut using the current AI4 hardware instead of the new AI5 chip.

    This means Tesla’s flagship autonomous taxi will essentially operate with the same computing brain as a Model 3. As a result, it will almost certainly require a steering wheel, remote human oversight, operational limits similar to competitor Waymo.

    It also means that the Cybercab will likely be confined to tightly geofenced areas until upgraded hardware becomes available.

    And that’s if 2027 is a realistic new deadline. A move from mid 2025 to mid 2027, in Elon-speak, often implies a much longer horizon.

    Musk floated the idea of building a chip production facility to scale production at a November 6 shareholder meeting: “Even when we extrapolate the best-case scenario for chip production from our suppliers, it’s still not enough,” Musk said at the Nov. 6 annual meeting. “I think we’re probably going to have to build a gigantic chip fab.” But Morningstar notes that it can take 5-7 years to build such a facility.

    What does this mean for Tesla’s future?

    Tesla’s valuation which rests heavily on technology rather than automotive fundamentals. That means the company’s perceived technological lead is in many ways more important to its valuation than its actual technological lead.

    You only need to look at Tesla’s 274 price to earnings ratio versus Toyota’s 8.5 to infer that investors tend to treat Tesla as a technology company rather than an automotive company.

    Elon Musk reinforces that perception every chance he gets. When earnings disappoint, he pivots the conversation to autonomy, chips, data centers, and robots with unlimited market potential.

    So what happens next?

    Will competitors use this window to showcase taxis and robots that appear similarly capable? What will this mean for Tesla’s perceived technological lead?

    It is difficult to predict… because Musk remains one of the most persuasive storytellers and futurists in business. But this small announcement about a small chip could have unusually large consequences.

    Tesla’s stock has always been the company’s fuel. It let Musk finance every ambitious project because the market values Tesla on what it might become, not what it is now. As long as he nudges timelines forward without breaking the spell, belief stays intact and Tesla floats above the entire auto industry in value.

    This time the promise is different. You can delay autonomy and robots. You cannot delay the physics of making chips. Semiconductor production is visible to the entire supply chain. TSMC, Samsung, ASML, everyone can see exactly what Tesla is or is not building. There is no way to fake progress here.

    Musk knows this, which is why he wants Tesla to become a chip maker. But that path takes years and follows a pace set by the entire global semiconductor ecosystem, not by narrative or ambition.

    So the question is simple. How long before Tesla’s market cap, the engine of every dream so far, starts to wobble. This time the future comes with a timestamp. And the world can read it.

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

    The final deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, December 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

    Dave Sokolin

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  • Elon Musk Claims Money Won’t Exist in the Future (and Jensen Huang Would Like a Heads Up)

    Elon Musk made some wild claims at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, insisting that his Optimus robot would fix poverty, people wouldn’t have to work in the future, and money would eventually become irrelevant. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was also on stage and joked that he’d like Musk to give him a heads up just before currency no longer becomes a thing.

    “AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty,” Musk claimed on Wednesday. “And Tesla won’t be the only one that makes them. I think Tesla will pioneer this, but there will be many other companies that make humanoid robots. But there is only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics.”

    The Tesla CEO has frequently insisted in recent months that his robots will deliver a kind of post-scarcity future where nobody has to work. The billionaire said it explicitly on Wednesday when asked about what he thinks the future holds for those who are concerned about AI and robots replacing jobs.

    “My prediction is that work will be optional,” Musk said, noting that he was talking about 10-20 years from now.

    The billionaire went on to take his now-common prediction even further, claiming that in such a world where robots are doing all the labor, money won’t exist anymore.

    “I’d always recommend people read Iain Banks’ Culture books to get a sense for what a probable positive AI future is like. And interestingly, in those books, money is no longer… doesn’t exist. It’s kind of interesting,” Musk said.

    “My guess is, if you go out long enough, assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely, the money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,” Musk continued.

    The moderator of the discussion asked, “Jensen, any thoughts?” as the crowd laughed. “By the way, the Nvidia earnings call is later today,” Musk said, joining the laughter.

    Huang shifted uncomfortably in his seat and laughed to himself with a kind of bewildered look. “And by the way, since currency is irrelevant…” Huang joked, trailing off. “Elon just wants to share with you breaking news.”

    After a good laugh, Huang got serious again and sort of hedged on what Musk was saying. Huang has previously taken the opposite view of the crowd that insists there won’t be any work in the future. Back in August, Huang said that AI and automation will actually make everyone busier. Huang acknowledged that things would be different, including things like how students learn and how people do their work. But he stuck to his guns in predicting that people will actually just be busier because they can accomplish more of their goals.

    “It is my guess that Elon will be busier as a result of AI. I’m gonna be busier as a result of AI,” said Huang. “And the reason for that is because we have so many ideas we wanna pursue, so many things that we still have in our backlog inside our company that we can go pursue. If we were more productive, we can get to those things faster, and so in the near term, I would say that there’s every evidence that we will be more productive and yet still be busier because we have so many ideas.”

    Huang then joked that since he texts with Musk often, he hopes the Tesla CEO will give him a heads up before currency is no longer relevant. Musk said, “You’ll see it coming.”

    Musk is constantly talking about how the robots he’s developing at Tesla, known as Optimus, are the key to eliminating poverty. But, as we’ve written before, this is probably his most ridiculous lie. Improving efficiency doesn’t redistribute wealth. Musk never addresses who will be paying Americans to just sit around and do nothing while billions of robots actually perform the labor. Is it the government? Because that would require a massive change in political and economic structures.

    And why should we believe Musk, of all people, wants to pay people for sitting around? This is the man who stormed into the federal government earlier this year with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and decided that too many people were taking advantage of government benefits. He’s also the guy who has called the word homeless a “propaganda word” for “violent drug addicts.”

    Musk frequently tries to suggest that people experiencing homelessness don’t have jobs, even though somewhere between 40 and 60% of people who don’t have housing are employed, according to government estimates. He does not give a fuck about poverty. He cares about making more money and is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. And he never talks about the mechanism by which his utopian idea for a leisure society would actually work.

    The ideas Musk promotes were extremely common in 20th-century futurism. And it’s clear that’s where he’s drawing his inspiration, even citing Iain Banks and his utopian Culture series of books on Wednesday. But none of it makes sense unless you establish some kind of radical socialist or communist entity at the heart of this vision to distribute the necessities to live.

    Musk wants to sell you his robots, and that makes sense in our current economic system. But after he sells you a robot, it doesn’t follow that the person who owns that robot would no longer have to work. It’s a bit like imagining that all of the appliances in your home right now are somehow paying for themselves. They’re not. They may improve your life, but they don’t institute a political or economic system whereby people no longer have to work. If all wealth is derived from robots in this imaginary system Musk creates, he would have to be the one redistributing his wealth to pay for everyone else not working.

    The end of the discussion with Musk and Huang was a good reminder of where we’re actually situated here in 2025. The Saudi moderator said “my boss and your bosses is going to talk next,” referring to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and President Donald Trump. The two tech executives didn’t vocally object to Donald Trump being called their “boss.” But it stripped away the fantasy Musk seemed to be engaged in about robotics and AI delivering utopia anytime soon.

    Trump and MBS have no plans to let people sit around and get paid for doing nothing. And they’re building a future where that could never conceivably happen.

    Matt Novak

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  • Elon Musk Couldn’t Care Less About Poverty

    Tesla held its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, and CEO Elon Musk seemed particularly focused on getting his $1 trillion payday. But before the world’s wealthiest man made the case for why he deserves to be the first trillionaire, he wanted to make sure you understand one thing: He’s going to help abolish poverty.

    “We’re excited about the updated mission of Tesla, which is sustainable abundance,” Musk said on the call.

    “So going beyond sustainable energy to, say, sustainable abundance is the mission, where we believe with Optimus and self-driving, that you can actually create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care. Optimus will be an incredible surgeon, for example. And imagine if everyone had access to an incredible surgeon.”

    To be clear, Optimus, Tesla’s robot, is nowhere near ready to be a “surgeon.” But Musk went on, tossing in a caveat about safety.

    “So I think there’s… you know, of course, we make sure Optimus is safe and everything, but I do think we’re headed for a world of sustainable abundance. And I’m excited to work with the Tesla team to make that happen,” said Musk.

    Musk’s utopian vision isn’t new

    The billionaire has long teased the idea that the future will be filled with so many robots and so much automation that nobody will have to work. It’s an idea that was incredibly popular in the 20th century, not just in science fiction but among serious academics. Back in the 1960s, it was just taken as a given that people of the year 2000 would only work maybe 20 hours per week. And beyond that, by the mid-21st century, no one would have to work at all.

    That vision for the future didn’t work out, of course. Granted, much of the U.S. workforce became George Jetson-style button pushers in the sense that we have a large information-based economy where many people sit at keyboards typing. But the ability to just sit at home and not work while robots do everything is still a fantasy. And it’s a fantasy because the problem isn’t technological, it’s political.

    There is no way to ever deliver a leisure society where everyone gets paid to do nothing unless you create a political and economic system that delivers that. The “free market” will not just cause that to happen by magic. When Amazon uses robots to streamline its operations—replacing workers and sorting packages more efficiently—the online retailer doesn’t give the money it saves to workers. That money goes to shareholders. And it’s unclear how many people actually believe that Musk’s robots would somehow deliver what he dubs a “universal high income” in the future, above and beyond a universal basic income.

    Musk doesn’t understand poverty

    In reality, Musk does not give a fuck about poverty. To guys like Musk, people who are poor are just getting what they deserve. And all it takes is a quick search of his X account to see how often he says things to degrade homeless people.

    “In most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie,” Musk tweeted on Dec. 10, 2024. “It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness.”

    You may notice that Musk’s tweet was sent a month following the 2024 presidential election, after Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris, but before Trump was sworn in for his second term on January 20.

    Musk would soon join Trump’s government as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he helped unlawfully abolish the foreign aid program USAID and ran riot through just about every federal agency, destroying programs he didn’t like and hoovering up personal data along the way. What gave him the legal authority to do that? Nothing. But Musk did it anyway with the blessing of President Trump, until the two men predictably had a falling out.

    Who deserves a good life?

    Musk believes that the U.S. is built on meritocracy, where people who have billions of dollars obviously deserve that money, and people who are poor deserve to stay poor. He demonstrated that time and again with DOGE, claiming that he was rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. The “fraud,” as he saw it, was people who were undeserving of the government benefits they received, whether it was food stamps or Social Security, a program he called a Ponzi scheme.

    Remember when Musk went to CPAC in February and swung around a chainsaw, symbolic of the government programs he was going to cut? Those programs are what would be necessary to deliver money and services to people in order to make sure no one is poor. Why on Earth would anyone believe that he cares about poverty after such a ridiculously over-the-top display of his power?

    Elon Musk holds a chainsaw reading “Long live freedom, damn it” during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025. © Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

    Musk frequently insists that America’s homelessness problem is the fault of those on the streets.

    “The vast majority of those on the streets are there due to severe drug addiction and/or mental illness,” Musk tweeted on Nov. 9, 2024. “The issue not that they got a little behind in their mortgage payments and would be back on their feet if someone just offered them a job.”

    But Musk doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The billionaire quite literally doesn’t see the people who are struggling as he gets shuttled around the world. The majority of people who are homeless “have no mental health or substance use disorder,” according to the United States Interagency on Homelessness. Somewhere between 40-60% of people who lack homes also have a job.

    As the agency explains on its website: “Today, only 37 affordable homes are available for every 100 extremely low-income renters. As a result, 70% of the lowest-wage households spend more than half their income on rent, placing them at high risk of homelessness when unexpected expenses (such as car repairs and medical bills) arise.”

    Elon doesn’t believe in charity

    Musk has repeatedly said that he doesn’t really believe in charity. The CEO insists that he’s doing enough good in the world through his private companies. When the head of the UN World Food Program noted in 2021 that Musk could end world hunger with just 2% of his wealth, Musk balked at the idea.

    Instead of giving $6 billion to end hunger for 42 million people, as the UN had proposed, he gave $5.7 billion to an undisclosed charity. Forbes reports the most likely recipient was a donor-advised fund (DAF), which “behaves like a philanthropic bank account.” Forbes doesn’t even count DAF donations as charitable contributions when tracking billionaires because the money can just sit in the account indefinitely.

    Forbes also notes that donating to a DAF gets Musk a huge tax break. So it seems pretty obvious what’s happened there. Musk’s private foundation hasn’t donated the legally required 5% of its assets for three years in a row, more evidence that any “giving” he does is mostly for tax reasons.

    Musk’s promises about fixing poverty are PR

    Investors vote on Musk’s $1 trillion pay package on Nov. 6, calling the people who oppose it “corporate terrorists” during his call on Wednesday. And he knows full well that he needs to pay lip service to those struggling financially right now, since he’s accumulating an obscene amount of wealth.

    But Musk has to know that his utopian pitch for Optimus will not deliver a work-free society. And selling robots has nothing to do with creating that perfect world; it’s about making more money for him. Same as it ever was.

    Matt Novak

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  • Elon Musk’s Latest Robot Video Looks Like It Was Shot on a Phone From 2002

    Elon Musk’s Latest Robot Video Looks Like It Was Shot on a Phone From 2002

    Elon Musk has shared a new video on Saturday featuring Optimus, the robot Tesla has been working on since 2021. But anyone who tries to watch the video will immediately notice something weird. The clip of Optimus is so low quality and pixelated that it looks like it was shot on a flip-phone from two decades ago.

    Mr. Tweet Fumbles Super Bowl Tweet

    The new video was posted in the early morning hours of Saturday and has been viewed over 35 million times as of this writing. But the video appears to show Optimus just walking around without doing much of anything. That would have been quite impressive around 2013 or so, since it’s relatively difficult to get machines to walk like humans, but it’s not entirely clear why Musk would want the world to see Optimus walking like this.

    Update, 3:58 p.m. ET: At some point in the past 30 minutes or so Elon Musk’s video was swapped out to include a higher resolution version. Curiously, tweets that have been edited will typically show a note at the bottom that says a tweet has been edited and the time it occurred, but Musk’s tweet doesn’t indicate anything has been changed.

    The screenshots below show a side-by-side of what the tweet looked like before it was changed to include a higher resolution video.

    Screenshot: Elon Musk / X

    We’ve reached out to Twitter to see if Musk has special rules as owner of the social media platform and will update this post if we hear back. The rest of this post is being kept up for posterity.

    Incremental technical achievements aside, why does this video look so terrible? We weren’t the only ones to notice the bizarrely pixelated quality, as plenty of Musk fans made jokes about the blurriness.

    “Was this filmed with a potato?” one user quipped.

    “Same photographer?” another X user quipped with a photo of Bigfoot.

    Tesla didn’t immediately respond to questions about this new video of Optimus emailed Saturday.

    Musk unveiled Optimus with an unconventional presentation in the summer of 2021 that really felt like the billionaire was desperate to hype virtually anything futuristic. Tesla’s AI Day that year didn’t feature a real robot, but rather someone dressed in a white and black suit moving around like a stereotypical robot before starting to dance a jig.

    Tesla’s robot has made progress since that first jokey unveiling, but Optimus still has quite a ways to go before it can catch up to the most cutting edge robots of the 2020s. Atlas, a humanoid robot made by Boston Dynamics, started learning how to pick itself up in 2016, standing on one leg that same year, doing backflips in 2017, and achieved parkour-style jumping in 2018.

    And Atlas is still making progress in ways that rival how humans actually move. Last year, the Atlas robot showed off its ability to manipulate its environment to navigate complex worksites.

    Optimus has made improvements since it was first announced but it has quite a ways to go if it wants to catch up to a company like Boston Dynamics. Arguably the most impressive thing we’ve seen Optimus do is fold laundry, but if you take a close look at the video, there was a person standing just off-screen mimicking the movements. And, frankly, that’s technology that’s been possible since the 1960s.

    Can Tesla develop a truly autonomous robot that can work as a household servant, just as Musk has promised? Only time will tell. But we’ve been waiting on that version of the future for over a century now. Robotics is hard. But we can certainly keep dreaming.

    Matt Novak

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  • Notion acquires privacy-focused productivity platform Skiff | TechCrunch

    Notion acquires privacy-focused productivity platform Skiff | TechCrunch


    Notion launched its new calendar based on Cron last month, but its productivity suit can soon have more privacy-focused offerings. The company announced today that it has acquired Skiff, a platform that offers end-to-end encrypted file storage, docs, calendar events, and email.

    Skiff was started in 2020 by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg. The company had raised $14.2 million in funding over two rounds from investors such as Sequoia Capital along with Alphabet chairman John Hennessy, former Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang, and Eventbrite co-founders Julia and Kevin Hartz, Balaji Srinivasan, and re–Inc founder Jenny Wang.

    Skiff Mobile client

    Image Credits: Skiff

    In a conversation with co-founders posted on the Notion blog, the company’s COO Akshay Kothari said that Notion had taken note of Skiff’s work right from the start.

    “Skiff started showing up on our radar at Notion right from the beginning. I actually tried to reach out in 2020 when you were building your Docs product. We never connected then, but I kept tabs on your progress. Then a few months ago, Ivan [Notion co-foudner] and I were talking, and Skiff came up again. I downloaded all the products y’all had built, and was really impressed by the attention to detail,” Kothari said.

    While the company started out as a secure alternative to Google Docs, it also built other productivity solutions such as calendar and email.

    Skiff mentioned on its website that the company is joining Notion. On a support page, the Skiff said that the product would shut down after six months. It mentioned that the Skiff user account won’t be converted to a Notion account. Plus, users can easily export or migrate their data to other services.

    Notion’s last acquisition was the workflow management tool Flowdash in 2022. Prior to that, it acquired Cron and India-based Automate.io, which had a suite of integrations with 200 services.



    Ivan Mehta

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  • With Disney’s magic, Fortnite is poised to win the metaverse | TechCrunch

    With Disney’s magic, Fortnite is poised to win the metaverse | TechCrunch


    We may not be using the M word much these days, but the race to build an interconnected avatar-driven virtual world didn’t take the last year off.

    The metaverse, a tech buzzword sandwiched in between the hype eras of NFTs and AI, is still being built, regardless of what we’re calling it. And in light of news this week, one company is increasingly positioned to dominate the near future.

    Epic Games and Disney revealed Wednesday that they are designing an “entertainment universe” together full of Disney-flavored games to play and things to buy. The multiyear project will deploy Epic’s under-the-hood technology and Fortnite’s social gaming ecosystem to bring characters from Disney’s vast intellectual property vault to life. Disney invested $1.5 billion for a chunk of Epic in the deal.

    In an image promoting the project, Disney and Epic portray their work together as a series of futuristic colorful islands floating in space with highways running between them and a Magic Castle glowing in the center, a beacon of cash-printing possibility. Those highways, whether literally or symbolically, will connect with Epic’s Fortnite — a hit game that’s now evolved into a massive online social ecosystem.

    Fortnite’s evolution

    Fortnite is best-known as a third-person shooter where 100 players swarm a shrinking virtual island and fight to be the last man standing. The game is famous for its goofy maximalism and it encourages players to dress in custom “skins” which can be obtained by playing or be bought through Epic’s lucrative virtual swag shop. In Fortnite, you can, as Darth Vader, roll over your enemy in a giant hamster wheel, slingshotted through the attic of a suburban foursquare home. Your foe might be dressed as Goku from Dragon Ball Z, Ariana Grande or Meowscles, a buff shirtless cat (an Epic original).

    In its early days, Fortnite was about as ubiquitous and popular as a game can be. Streaming gameplay routinely drew hundreds of thousands of viewers on Twitch, where a cottage industry of pro Fortnite players emerged, all laser-focused on Epic’s polished battle royale. By 2020, the game already had more registered players than the population of the United States. In 2023, the game saw something of a resurgence and 100 million people logged in last November.

    Anyone who still thinks of Fortnite solely as that goofy battle royale will be surprised to learn the extent of Epic’s true ambitions.

    In recent years, Epic has steadily been expanding its marquee title into something much more akin to a platform or marketplace than a simple standalone game. Over the years, Fortnite’s psychedelic seasonal events, kaiju Travis Scott concerts and user-generated sandbox worlds all hinted at these grand plans. In December, Epic tripled down by simultaneously launching three new games within the game: Lego Fortnite, a Minecraft/Animal Crossing hybrid, Fortnite Festival, a rhythm game from the studio behind Rock Band, and Rocket Racing, a fast-paced racing title from the makers of Rocket League.

    That slate of new games was already ambitious, but this week’s surprise news that Disney is coming to Fortnite (or the other way around) is on another level entirely. The two companies already have a relationship; Disney first invested in Epic through its accelerator program in 2017 and has licensed many of its Marvel and Star Wars characters to Fortnite as skins, but the new $1.5 billion investment signals a much deeper long-term play.

    Disney needs Fortnite

    With Fortnite, Disney is in an interesting position of needing something it probably couldn’t do better itself.

    Epic Games is light years ahead of many of its peers on seamless online multiplayer gaming. Running smooth, fast simultaneous instances of detailed virtual worlds for many millions of people is both technically complex and expensive. Any Fortnite player could be forgiven for not realizing that because Epic’s core experience runs perfectly the vast majority of the time, enabling people across devices to play and chat together instantly. Fortnite looks and moves as well as it does thanks to Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, which Disney’s partner Square Enix will also use for Kingdom Hearts IV, the latest game in the hit franchise featuring Disney characters.

    In the announcement, Disney CEO Bob Iger called the Epic partnership “Disney’s biggest entry ever into the world of games.” Because whatever the two companies come up with will be interoperable with Fortnite, Disney also stands to instantly gain Fortnite’s 100 million monthly players without needing to build a player base from scratch.

    The benefits will also extend the other way, and Fortnite might be able to leapfrog Roblox’s own numbers, which are currently at least double its own. Disney, like Lego, will also widen Fortnite’s appeal beyond the audience that plays battle royale and Fortnite’s other shooting-centric games. Fortnite offerings in other genres could bring in players both younger and older and expand the game’s appeal to more women, who are currently enjoying the rise of cozy gaming, and to parents looking for family-friendly titles.

    Fortnite’s business model is also key for the potential success of the Disney collaboration. Games in Fortnite’s ecosystem are free to play, and the company makes its money through brand licensing partnerships and in-game purchases like skins, dances and emotes, which rotate through its virtual store on a daily basis.

    If the popularity of Fortnite character skins from Disney-owned franchises like Star Wars and Marvel is any indication, players will be eager to collect their favorites and show them off on Fortnite’s slickly-animated avatars. From Elsa and Mickey to Princess Leia and Iron Man, Disney’s vast vault of characters is a near-endless resource with limitless revenue potential for both companies.

    State of the metaverse

    Meta may have gone to the trouble of renaming itself after the metaverse, but when solving for the future, the company formerly known as Facebook got the equation backward. By focusing on VR hardware, a market the company mostly had cornered after buying Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion, Meta wound up with a solution in need of a problem — a how without a what. Apple’s new Vision Pro, while technically very impressive, may hit a similar adoption wall.

    While Meta was obsessing over building its Oculus acquisition into a mainstream consumer product, companies like Epic, Roblox, Minecraft-maker Mojang and others were developing avatar-driven virtual worlds where people loved spending time. Importantly, those worlds are widely available and hardware agnostic, meaning that a PlayStation 5 player could square off in a fight against someone on a PC or even an iPhone (Epic’s complex standoff with Apple notwithstanding).

    Horizon Worlds was Meta’s answer to those experiences — creepy legless avatars and all — but by then many millions of people were already invested in a virtual world that suits them, no headgear necessary. These social gaming worlds are all extremely sticky and people love hanging out in them, expressing themselves through virtual purchases and generally doing the whole thing sans VR.

    In light of their success, Epic, Roblox and Mojang all smartly positioned things we once thought of as games instead as platforms. Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft all host user-generated content, sometimes called UGC — a not very helpful acronym that means players can also upload their own game modes and virtual goods there for other players to try or buy. This content is very, very popular — according to Epic, 70% of Fortnite players play user-made content in addition to the core experience. Its what people think of when they talk about Roblox. For these companies, user-generated content doesn’t cost anything, keeps players coming back and can bring in low-effort revenue.

    Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft and other avatar-based virtual worlds can co-exist, but Fortnite boasts some unique advantages. While its peers lean on their nostalgia-heavy looks, Fortnite’s high fidelity graphics and sophisticated animations (so sophisticated they’ve sparked more than one lawsuit over dance moves) are more future-proofed and brand friendly. Minecraft and Roblox are powerhouses in their own right, but the former is more of a game than an ecosystem and the latter will need to prove it can retain its young core users as they age up. Meanwhile, Epic commands a deep understanding of the ways people want to express themselves online and the technical prowess, and now partnerships, to make it possible.

    Online multiplayer games aren’t social networks in a traditional sense, but the two categories are converging, with games becoming more like social networks and social networks increasingly full of games. As the Fortnite cinematic universe expands to include Lego, Rock Band and now Disney, Epic is poised to introduce a huge swath of new players to a virtual world that’s as much about who you’re with as it is about what you’re doing — and wasn’t that the promise of the metaverse all along?



    Taylor Hatmaker

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