Well, I guess you have to start somewhere. I'm sure his goal is to make a machine where you can just dump clothes in and they come out folded. But the technology isn't there yet and it takes time to develop. He's probably hoping he can sell a few of these useless machines and keep funding his R&D until he can build a fully functional version.

If he can make it work the first ones will be for the crazy rich and the next generation will be much less expensive.

I'd think the crazy rich would just hire a maid.

Laundrettes?

Maybe if you had a guy whose job was to feed clothes into it in just the right way. TBF an experienced laundry person can fold them manually, much faster.

Don't let a robot do something a human can do better.

A robot doesn't have to do something better than a human to succeed; it just has to do it well enough for us to accept the trade-off.

A good example is robot vacuum cleaners: I have had one for a few years now and it's easily the best purchase I've ever made: it doesn't vacuum as well as we do but it does it everyday which is something I'm absolutely unwilling to do. Having it in my home greatly reduced the amount of time we had to dedicate to cleaning the floor and dusting non-floor surfaces (it turns out that daily vacuuming the floor has a huge impact in the amount of dust collected everywhere else).

Why not ? Humans are still far better than robots at car manufacturing, and yet ... nobody wants to go back to that (well, none of the customers or company leaders would want the prices to rise by enough to make that possible)

Does anyone want a folded ironed shirt with the buttons done up?

The last thing I want to do when getting dressed in the morning is undo a bunch of buttons.

Defeats the point right!

There already exist machines that work on a more industrial scale. This seems aimed more at the home market.

These machines suck too. In the factory clothing is folded manually using a basic device so it looks neat.