The Twitter Deal Pierces Elon Musk’s Reality Distortion Field

On the evening of Sept. 30, a Friday, the world’s wealthiest man stood on a stage in Palo Alto and showed off a humanoid robot. Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., had first announced the effort a year earlier, promising it would usher in a revolution in artificial intelligence by presenting a robot that was really a dancer wearing a costume. This time a “production unit” of the droid, dubbed Optimus, had to be wheeled out by three engineers because its legs didn’t seem to work yet.

Under normal circumstances, shortcomings like this would ...