Elon Musk admitted during Tesla’s latest earnings call that his projections about the volume of humanoid robots the EV maker will produce and the amount of revenue they’ll generate sound “absolutely insane.”
“The future is going to be incredibly different from the past. That’s for sure,” he said. “We live at this unbelievable inflection point in human history.”
During the call, Musk said Tesla had a record-breaking 2024 with nearly 2 million cars delivered. However, the company’s profits fell short of expectations. Tesla faces stiffening competition in robotics from Chinese firms like Unitree Robotics, whose humanoid robots went viral for their mesmerizing performance during China’s Lunar New Year festivities.
Musk said he believes Tesla’s AI-powered robot and self-driving cars will make the company worth more than the Top 5 global companies combined. In the end, Musk predicts Optimus alone could be a $10 trillion business.
“I’m making, you know, these revenue predictions that sound absolutely insane,” he said. “I realize that, but I think they will prove to be accurate.”
Musk said training is a major challenge for commercial Optimus, with 10 times more AI training required compared to Tesla’s autonomous vehicles. He said humanoids probably have a thousand times more roles to learn than a self-driving vehicle.
He also took a subtle jab at the OpenAI-led Stargate project’s estimated total cost of half a trillion dollars. Musk has continued his feud with OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman as they both closely collaborate with the Trump Administration.
“It doesn’t mean … we’re going to spend like $500 billion in training compute because obviously we’ll train Optimus to do enough tasks to match the output of Optimus robots,” he said.
He said the cost of training is dropping fast, which makes widescale deployment more realistic.
Tesla started using Generation 2 Optimus robots in its Gigafactory in 2024 for repetitive tasks. A second production version of the humanoid is planned for early-to-mid 2025. Tesla might start selling its humanoids in very limited quantities in the second half of the year.
“Our goal is to ramp Optimus production faster than maybe anything’s ever been ramped,” he said. “If we aspire to an order of magnitude ramp per year, perhaps we only end up with half an order of magnitude ramp per year but that’s the kind of growth that we’re talking about.”
As noted by @TheHumanoidHub on X, Tesla is ramping up hiring for manufacturing its robots. The company recently added 11 new job postings for its Fremont and Palo Alto facilities. The listings seek engineering technicians who will help build, repair, and refine Tesla’s first robot manufacturing lines.
Hiring for Tesla Bot manufacturing is ramping up.
— The Humanoid Hub (@TheHumanoidHub) January 24, 2025
Eleven new jobs were posted within the past week for Fremont and Palo Alto.
One of the job descriptions states:
"Engineering Technicians within the Humanoid AI Robot team work side by side with Engineers to support and sustain… pic.twitter.com/7jiMxrKwCG
Tesla says the manufacturing system will produce highly actuated robots with complex hardware and AI integrations that are electronically and computationally dense. The hiring push aligns with Musk’s 2025 timeline for scaling production of Tesla Bots.
“The normal internal plan calls for roughly 10,000 Optimus robots to be built this year,” he said. “Will we succeed in building 10,000 exactly by the end of December this year? Probably not, but will we succeed in making several thousand? Yes, I think we will.”
He added that he’s confident those several thousand robots will be “doing useful things by the end of the year.”
In a recent interview for CES 2025, Musk expressed optimism about Tesla’s production plans for the year.
“Assuming it goes well, we’ll 10x that output next year, so we’ll aim to do maybe 50,000 to 100,000 humanoid robots next year and then 10x again the following year,” he said. “It’s like 500,000 robots in three years. That’s a lot.”