The video is slapstick perfection: a humanoid called AIdol staggers onto a Moscow stage to the Rocky theme, wobbles, waves—and promptly face-plants as handlers rush in with a black sheet. The clip went viral within hours. Its team blamed “calibration issues.” The symbolism is too neat to resist. Russia, punch-drunk on techno-nationalism, is playing catch-up, a week after America’s most controversial CEO was doing the robot dance in Austin—and asking investors for $1 trillion to finance an embodied-AI revolution. Elon Musk’s pitch is simple: pay him like a once-in-history founder so he can build once-in-history robots. Shareholders said yes.

China, meanwhile, is not waiting for applause; it’s deadly serious. It’s throwing subsidies, tenders, and supply chains at humanoids, even promising to sell some for about the price of a used compact car. The slapstick in Moscow is a sideshow. The main event is a contest over how the West, and especially the U.S., will compete with a state-directed Chinese push into “embodied AI.”

Progressives see plutocracy in Musk’s pay. “No CEO is worth a trillion-dollar pay package,” said Emma Ruby-Sachs of the advocacy group Ekō as unions warned against the plan.

Corporate-governance critics add that the issue is stewardship, not just size. “Calling Musk distracted from his work at Tesla would be an understatement,” argued Bartlett Naylor of Public Citizen, which urged investors to vote no.

Senator Bernie Sanders was blunter: the award is “oligarchy.”

On the pro-Musk side, markets-first analysts framed the vote as a necessary bet on embodied AI. Wedbush’s Dan Ives called the approval a “bright green light,” and CNBC’s Jim Cramer backed the move