Tesla and Amazon are building the workforce a 1921 play imagined: One that never asks for a wage

Tesla has moved its Optimus humanoid robot into early production while Agility Robotics has become a publicly traded company, sharpening investor attention on machines designed to work without wages. The developments give public-market exposure to a theme previously confined to private startups and prototypes, with Tesla leaning on its manufacturing scale and Agility offering a pure-play listing. The article frames the shift through a 1921 play about automation, arguing that the real economic risk emerges only in aggregate—when enough employers adopt such machines to affect wages and employment across the labor market rather than at any single company. What to watch next is production volumes and unit costs for Optimus and Agility’s deployment pipeline, since those figures will determine how quickly automation moves from headline to measurable labor-market effect.