The billionaire boss said it was “truly shameful” of the media to dig up an old injury from two years ago caused by a standard industrial robot arm and blame it on his new Optimus robots.

Musk did not deny the attack happened in 2021. Two witnesses saw an engineer get grabbed and pinned down by a robot while he was updating its software.

The engineer was left bleeding after the robot clawed him and only got free when another worker hit the emergency stop button, the report said.

But Musk was furious at the Daily Mail for using a picture of his Optimus robots - the human-like machines he unveiled last year - instead of the robot arm involved in the 2021 accident.

Musk has big plans for his Optimus robots, which he says could make the economy “quasi-infinite” if they could do manual labour.

He said this would mean a future of plenty, where there is no poverty, and everyone can have whatever they want – at least among those with lots of money.

But Musk’s Tesla factories have faced a lot of safety complaints over the years. In 2020, California regulators said Tesla sent them dodgy injury reports.

In April, Chinese inspectors said they wanted to punish Tesla for safety flaws after a worker in Shanghai died when he was crushed by factory equipment.

In October, Tesla denied claims from a German union and the media that the Berlin Gigfactory had no safety measures.