No one in robotics posts like Brett Adcock.
The 39-year-old founder and CEO of Figure AI is becoming one of tech’s most polarizing figures, perhaps intentionally, with a social media strategy that’s unorthodox and abrasive. He makes no effort to treat other robotics firms as peers. He casts the humanoid race as winner-takes-all and opts out of the industry’s collaborative norms.
Cold or not, the approach works: Figure has pulled in nearly $2 billion and likely holds the biggest war chest in the field.
Figure is a perceived leader in a race that ultimately hinges on a major breakthrough that may not happen anytime soon. Companies getting major funding now are either claiming they’ll solve the problem or are set up to profit when someone else does. Figure is the former, and Adcock openly says he wants to build it into the largest and most transformative company in the history of everything.
Adcock became a billionaire in tech outside the traditional Silicon Valley elite pipeline. He grew up in Illinois and has a BS in business administration from the University of Florida. His first major success, the tech-driven recruitment marketplace Vettery, was a self-driven venture that he scaled and sold for around $100 million. He repeated the pattern with Archer Aviation, the eVTOL company that later went public at a multibillion-dollar valuation and made him a billionaire.
Adcock’s stature on social media began a rapid ascent in 2023 when Figure emerged from stealth. On X (formerly Twitter), his following has grown from around 60,000 in January 2023 to more than 300,000 by late 2025, according to the influencer marketing platform Favikon. He’s had a similar trajectory on LinkedIn, where he’s accumulated nearly 150,000 followers. He also has 35.K followers on Instagram, 24.4K on Threads, and 1.4K on Blueksy (where he’s inactive).
Homepage screenshot of Brett Adcock’s official website homepage on Nov. 16, 2025
As Figure’s valuation has grown to a staggering $39B, Adcock’s posting style has become edgier and more confrontational. During his early growth, he leaned heavily into professional, forward-looking updates on Figure’s progress, hiring pushes, pro tips for entrepreneurs, and threadboi content. Today, he calls out competitors regularly, accusing them of faking progress, lying about manufacturing output, and stealing Figure’s IP.
Though he’s comfortable challenging and criticizing competitors, he reacts forcefully when the scrutiny comes back at him. When Fortune Magazine suggested he exaggerated the work Figure was doing with BMW, Adcock responded by threatening legal action. The irony is hard to miss, especially given that many of his own public attacks have been far harsher, and with far more reach, than anything Fortune published.
UBTECH Robotics
Adcock went viral with his assertion that a marketing video from the Chinese company UBTECH Robotics showing what it calls the world’s first mass delivery of humanoid robots made with CGI.
The CEO, who recently called the progress of China’s humanoid robotics scene greatly exaggerated, said the way ceiling lights reflected from the humanoids’ heads was suspect. He referred to the Shenzhen-based robotics firm as “this Chinese company delivering these (fake) robots to their customers.”
Brett Adcock calls out UBTECH Robotics on X
UBTECH became the first Chinese humanoid robotics firm to go public in December 2023 when it entered the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX), shortly after Beijing set a national goal to mass produce humanoids by 2025 and to own the market by 2027. The company is aggressively scaling production of its diverse suite of robots after reportedly securing $112 million in orders domestically so far in 2025.
Barely known in the West, UBTECH started out selling consumer-grade robots, built-it-yourself kits, and Disney-licensed Iron Man and Star Wars interactive toys. The company has been publicly demonstrating bipedal humanoids at events like CES, World Robot Conference (WRC), and World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) since the late 2010s. UBTECH targeted consumers with initial prototypes but later shifted focus to industrial automation.
While some of the post’s replies supported Adcock’s take, a large wave pushed back, including people who insisted they were at the video shoot. UBTECH clapped back with a behind-the-scenes video with drone footage from the shoot. Though UBTECH didn’t reply directly to Adcock, it was clear they were responding to him: “They said it looked too perfect to be real, but perfect isn’t fabricated! It’s delicately engineered. The next era of intelligent manufacturing is here. Let’s build it together!”
UBTECH shared raw footage from its marketing video shoot to counter claims it was CGI
Adcock is standing by his original take. Responding to a post by mechanical engineer Fletcher Ewing suggesting the UBTECH footage legit, Adcock replied: “Lol that’s CGI.” Yong QUIAN, VP of Product at the Shenzhen humanoid startup Spirit AI, invited Adcock to China in a reply.
Brett Adcock doubled down on allegations that UBTECH’s viral marketing video was CGI on LinkedIn
MindOn Tech
Adcock also took aim at a newer Shenzhen firm, MindOn Tech (灵启万物). The startup, which was launched in May 2025 by former Tencent Robotics X lab researchers, immediately went viral with its first public demo of a Unitree G1 humanoid robot it trained to perform common household tasks. Using grippers, the humanoid picks up trash, delivers a package, tidies clutter, and interacts with children.
Figure founder Brett Adcock critiques viral demo from the new Shenzhen startup MindOn Tech
While the startup insists the robot is acting autonomous, without teleoperation, Adcock speculated that it wasn’t really acting on its own. Instead of thinking and reacting in real time, he said, the robot was mostly just replaying pre-recorded movements. He also pointed out that a disclaimer indicating the robot isn’t being teleoperated disappears at the end, right when the humanoid performs an action that would require real perception.
Agility Robotics
Tension between Figure and another perceived leader in the humanoid race, Agility Robotics, revealed itself publicly in early November 2025 and quickly escalated.
It started when Adcock posted on X: “One of my proudest moments was sending an autonomous humanoid robot into the real world. To this day, I believe Figure is the first and maybe the only company to achieve this.”
Agility Robotics and Brett Adcock feud on X
Someone at Salem, OR-based Agility took exception, and the startup’s official X account reposted Adcock’s boast with the text: “This has the same energy as the time your friend told you he was the first to make a cool drink by adding lemon juice to water.”
The post rubbed someone at Salem, OR-based Agility the wrong way. The startup’s official X account reposted Adcock’s boast with the text: “This has the same energy as the time your friend to you he was the first to make a cool drink by adding lemon juice to water.” Agility, which was spun out of Oregon State University’s Dynamic Robotics Laboratory in 2015, says its flagship robot, Digit, has already operated autonomously for high-profile deployments like Amazon and GXO Logistics.
Brett Adcock says Agility Robotics will be bankrupt in under 12 months
The exchange went from playful to nasty when Adcock bluntly predicted that Agility would be bankrupt in under a year. He added in a reply to the popular X account and Figure ally @TheHumanoidHub that “it’s due to poor engineering choices and almost no progress over the past 10 years” and they’re “unlikely to survive as things stand.”
Agility Robotics extended an olive branch despite Adcock’s prediction: “All jokes aside, we’re big fans of the work your team has done. It will take the entire industry pushing forward at max effort to deliver on our collective promise to society.”
OpenAI
Figure gained enormous momentum in early 2024 after securing a high-profile partnership with OpenAI, which had rapidly become the center of the global AI boom. Less than a year later, however, Adcock abruptly severed the relationship and began publicly downplaying OpenAI’s role in the collaboration. He later argued that large language models (LLMs) are the “smallest piece of the puzzle” to achieving general autonomy in robotics.
After breaking up with OpenAI, Figure announced its self-developed Helix AI vision-language-action (VLA) model. Since then, Adcock has argued that data is the true bottleneck to making robots useful to the masses. Figure is aggressively collecting human motion data to feed its end-to-end AI model.
1X Technologies
Adcock has been throwing subliminals at 1X Technologies since the Silicon Valley robotics firm unveiled its first NEO humanoid prototype in August 2024.
Initially, Figure and 1X were in different lanes. Figure was focused on industrial applications as it piloted its humanoids at BMW’s Spartanburg, SC automotive plant, while 1X was developing NEO as a household helper. They became more direct competitors when Adcock accelerated Figure’s push into the consumer market. Figure’s marketing now emphasizes domestic chores.
Figure AI’s homepage emphasizes household use cases
When 1X unveiled its second-generation NEO in February 2025, Adcock subtly called it out on social media by leaving it out of his weekly roundup of AI and robotics news roundup on X and Threads. He announced beforehand that he planned to exclude teleoperated demos made “with the intention of tricking you it’s autonomous.”
Brett Adcock subtly calls out 1X on X in February 2025
“It’s misleading for the general public and not fair to those making real end-to-end progress,” he wrote.
Though he didn’t name 1X directly, it was an obvious reference to his competitor’s 37-second marketing video introducing its NEO Gamma humanoid. The reveal was one of the biggest developments of the week, yet Adcock’s thread skipped over it. 1X’s video did not specify whether the humanoid in the demo was autonomous or teleoperation, and founder and CEO Bernt Bornich later clarified that it was a mix of both.
1X’s marketing video introducing its second-generation NEO Gamma humanoid robot for home (Source: 1X Technologies)
1X and Figure are taking different approaches as they aggressively push for home deployments.
1X, which was founded in Norway in 2014 and is now headquartered in Palo Alto, is taking preorders for its NEO robots, which can be leased for $499 monthly (6-month minimum) or bought outright for $20,000. While 1X says it’s working toward full autonomy, teleoperation will be used as a stand-in when as NEO’s capabilities improve. Data collected from early adopters will be used to advance 1X’s Redwood AI model.
Figure does not yet offer its robots for sale directly, though Adcock has said it gets enough inbound inquiries to sell 100,000 humanoids within the next four years. He is highly critical of the human-in-the-loop approach going to market. He accused competitors, including 1X, of deceiving the public by passing off teleoperated demos as autonomous.
“Most major competitors … are putting out most of their content and updates tele-opt from a human,” Adcock said on Nikhil Kamath’s WTF podcast in November 2025. “I think it’s perhaps some of the most deceiving things I’ve ever seen.”
Xpeng Iron
When the Chinese EV maker XPeng introduced its first full-sized humanoid robot, Iron, in late 2024, Adcock suggested that its hip design was stolen from Figure’s first-generation prototype. He said XPeng engineers “copied our entire spine/hips” before pointing out that Figure had already abandoned that architecture for good reasons.
Figure AI founder Brett Adcock attacks XPeng’s Iron
The accusation didn’t block XPeng from being included in Adcock’s weekly roundup, though he did add: “Wonder where they got the hips from.”
Tesla Optimus
In general, Adcock has treaded carefully when discussing Tesla’s humanoid ambitions. On the WTF podcast, he said he doesn’t seek out insider info on the EV maker’s Optimus program, which Elon Musk is framing as the central pillar of the manufacturer’s future vision.
Brett Adcock responds to a post about a 2024 Tesla Optimus demo
However, he’s made clear he believes Figure’s flagship humanoid ‘s superior to Tesla’s. In January 2024, he responded to a post on X comparing Tesla’s Optimus folding a shirt to a demo of Figure’s first-generation robot, the Figure 01, preparing coffee with: “Correct it’s a stark contrast – one was teleoperated and one was only neural nets.”
The Future of Humanoids
Entering 2026, Figure is still aggressively raising funds as it aims to ship at least 100,000 humanoids by 2029. Adcock recently posted a job listing for a so-called Head of Capital Formation to lead upcoming campaigns. The listing calls for a dealmaker who can independently source, structure, and close investments, and who is OK with a base salary of between $350K and $650K.
“My companies have raised $4 billion in the last 5 years. It’s now time to re-accelerate,” Adcock said on social media. “Today, I am assembling a Capital Formation team. This team will raise tens of billions to bring sci-fi into the present, reporting directly to me.”
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