Brett Adcock has spent the past decade turning tomorrow into money.

He made his first $30 million the old-fashioned way: building and then selling job website Vettery for $110 million in 2018. Everything since has come from putting a present-day price on a future-day product. In 2021, he took the air taxi outfit Archer Aviation public via SPAC, raising $858 million at a $1.7 billion valuation before its aircraft had flown a single commercial flight. He persuaded investors to value Figure at $39 billion while its humanoid robots were still working small-scale factory pilot projects and tightly controlled demonstrations. This May, he raised $700 million at a $6 billion valuation for Hark, an AI assistant company with nothing on the market at the time.

The work is real. Vettery was a legitimate win. Archer built a full-scale electric vertical takeoff-and-landing aircraft. Figure’s humanoids have worked on a BMW production line and have helped build 30,000 X3 SUVs, by the automaker’s count. Adcock, barely 40, has a reputation for raising enormous sums, recruiting talented engineers and getting difficult machines to work. He’s currently CEO of three companies. And when it comes to humanoids, he is a flywheel of enthusiasm.

“Over a long period of time we’ll have maybe ten or 20 billion humanoids on the planet,” he says. “They’ll run the whole supply chain. They’ll build homes for you.”

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Adcock also has a reputation for exaggeration. A pilot project becomes a fleet of robots. A falling-out with a marquee partner becomes a technical rout. It hasn’t slowed his rise: Early progress becomes a $39 billion valuation. His work, and his public account of it, have made him worth more than $20 billion and left BMW, OpenAI and Archer correcting the record in public.

Adcock’s claim that while at Archer he “architected, engineered and flight-tested five generations of aircraft”? An Archer spokesperson calls that “wildly inaccurate,” adding that “since his separation in 2022, he has consistently overstated his contributions.” (An Adcock spokesperson dispu­tes this, saying Archer was “attempting to take credit for and diminish his accomplishments.”)

That 2025 BMW pilot? In Adcock’s telling it involved a “fleet of robots performing end-to-end operations.” BMW tells Forbes that just one Figure robot worked at a time, with a second onsite to rotate in while the other one recharged.

Then there’s the OpenAI deal. The AI lab invested in Figure’s Series B in 2024, and the two companies set out to build the models that would run Figure’s robots. It all fell apart in less than a year.

OpenAI attributes the breakup to Figure’s “consistent failure to meet the deliverables required, gaps in software and hardware support” and unspecified “challenges in the working relationship.” Adcock says he fired OpenAI because his team “ran circles” around it.

None of this has tripped him up. Forbes now estimates his fortune at $23.4 billion, mostly thanks to the spike in Figure’s valuation. Because if a humanoid can theoretically do anything a human can, what price can you put on it?

Right now, the future of the humanoid market is essentially illegible. Morgan Stanley says it will be worth $5 trillion by 2050. Citi says $7 trillion. UBS says up to $1.7 trillion. RBC says $9 trillion to $12 trillion. Within this heady fog, Figure’s valuation went from $2.6 billion to $39 billion in 19 months.

That ambiguity is the zone in which Adcock thrives. It’s why he can confidently talk about humanoids taking over a big chunk of the $42 trillion annual global human labor market despite daunting constraints like a paucity of training data or labor unions, or the fact that teaching a humanoid to use scissors remains impossible. Remember, there is no easily scrapable internet of human behavior on which to train humanoids.

Friends such as Marc Benioff are impressed with the maximalist pitch. “He is extremely positive, extremely energetic, and he has a big vision. . . . [He makes] very aggressive statements about the future that are really things that we’ve heard about only in science fiction,” says the cofoun­der of Salesforce, a Figure investor.

“I think every human will have one, like a phone or car."

Adcock also has the well-polished endorsement of AI infra­structure powerhouse Jensen Huang. The Nvidia CEO says Adcock has “an extraordinary ability to imagine the future” and wrangle “the hard work of building it.” Nvidia, too, is a Figure investor.

Humanoids are our oldest fantasy. The Greeks imagined Hephaestus with golden handmaidens who could think and speak. Leonardo sketched a mechanical knight that could sit up and wave its arms. Westinghouse sent Elektro shambling onto........

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