Tesla’s stock price plunged 14% on Thursday after the car company reported negative free cash flow of $1.1 billion despite revenue rising 26% from a year earlier.
CEO Elon Musk sounded rather odd on the earnings call Wednesday evening, especially when it came to Optimus, his humanoid robot. Gone was the bluster and cockiness of a man who’s claimed there will be 10 billion robots by 2040. Everything that came out of his mouth sounded like a warning that Optimus might take considerably more time than he first promised.
“Optimus, as you’ve heard me say before, I think Optimus will be the biggest product ever. But it is a very complex problem to solve,” Musk said on the call.
The Tesla CEO went on and on about how difficult it is to design a robot, including considerations like wear and tear, achieving dexterity with the robot’s hands, and making sure it doesn’t break down. Musk also stressed that it would be difficult to produce the robots.
“I really want to emphasize here that the production scaling challenge is very substantial,” said Musk. “This is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla because everything on the robot is new. And the difficulty of scaling the production ramp is proportionate to the newness of the parts.”
Musk contrasted it with sourcing parts for Tesla cars, which is much easier. He also made excuses for why Tesla is so far behind other robotics companies. In short, he believes they’re cheating.
“So you’ve probably seen lots of impressive demonstrations of robots on the Internet,” said Musk. “But those demonstrations you’re seeing are preprogrammed or remote controlled. So there is no humanoid robot that is actually able to do generalized tasks. Optimus will be the first one that is capable of doing that.”
Optimus is clearly behind competitors like Figure and Boston Dynamics, which have released videos showing their robots doing things that make Musk’s robot look like a young child fumbling around. Musk has also gotten heat for using teleoperated robots for demonstrations, including when he had them serving beer at a Tesla event in 2024. Musk has also deployed tricks like using sped-up video to make Optimus look more agile than it is. Figure has been accused of using teleoperation for its demonstrations as well, something the CEO has denied.
The billionaire was asked on the call about a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, and he left the door open, saying he couldn’t comment on something like that yet. Musk’s fortunes are intimately tied to the stock prices of Tesla and SpaceX, which means his net worth as the wealthiest person in the world has gone down considerably. He’s currently worth $718 billion, according to Forbes, down from a high of $1.4 trillion when SpaceX was riding high. The stock is currently trading at $115 per share, down from a high of $201 per share shortly after the IPO.
At one point on Wednesday’s earnings call, Musk explained that he was ill, as though it was an excuse for something, though it’s not clear why he would say that. He sounded perfectly fine, even if he was clearly stressing about Optimus.
Musk has bet Tesla’s future on the idea that it’s a technology company, not a car company. And part of that bet includes making sure things like Optimus are real products, not just carnival sideshows to help drive revenue in other areas of the business through showmanship.
But it remains to be seen whether the Tesla CEO can pull it off. Musk isn’t wrong that robotics is hard. But he’s the one who’s spent recent years saying that by 2030 all jobs will be replaced by robots and they would soon be babysitting your kids. He even insists that money won’t exist in the future and everyone will have a high income because robots will be doing all the work.
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