Ever since Tesla revealed that it was working on a humanoid robot known as Optimus in 2021, Musk has spent years making the case that Tesla is really an AI and robotics company.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, in September 2025, Tesla CEO wrote, “~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus. ” And this was not the first time that Musk made an upbeat prediction on Optimus robots. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has predicted that Optimus robots will eventually make up for more than three-quarters of the automaker’s value.
Tesla reported $787 million in net income, a 43% drop from the same period in 2025, when it earned $1.37 billion. This week, Tesla announced that the company has started production of its Optimus humanoid robot at its factory in Fremont, California, a manufacturing space once dedicated to making electric vehicles (EVs). The company announced the same in a letter to shareholders.
None of the revenue gain was enough to outpace Tesla’s spending on artificial intelligence projects and its Optimus robot, which is said to have taken a big bite out of profits, according to analysts. That forward-looking development wasn’t, however, enough to lift the company’s third-quarter earnings.
He nonetheless claimed that Tesla will be able to make 20,000 of them per week by the end of 2027.
On a conference call, Musk said that he considers Optimus production as “early” right now and that the ramp will be slow and “somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product. “There’s still some things we need to tweak about the design, because you need to deliver a robot that is safe and reliable and has a long duration, so it can’t, like, wear out after a month,” he said. “And there’s still quite a lot of work to do with regard to the AI and the robot for it to be truly useful for open-ended tasks,” he added.