The problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China.

As if China cannot produce kick ass robots ? What special sauce does Musk have here that a country with a massive pool of highly trained and educated engineers and decades of manufacturing expertise don't have?

I would bet that as soon as someone "solves" robots. China will relatively shortly, that is months or few years produce something that surpasses them. They have all the pieces and all the capabilities. Just look at drones for example. It just requires correct solution and China might even be first to provided that.

I'm sure China can. But nobody is producing consumer humanoid robots at any scale yet, so Tesla can at least make the argument that they'll make better robots when people actually start buying robots. People are buying cars at scale right now, and existing Tesla models have fallen behind their Chinese competitors.