Elon Lied

said 29 Jan 2025

The normal internal plan calls for roughly 10,000 Optimus robots to be built this year. … 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.

— Elon Musk, contemporaneous report

Tesla Q4 2024 earnings call, where he added he was confident the several thousand robots would be "doing useful things by the end of the year." This raised his own June 2024 shareholder-meeting estimate of "a thousand to a couple thousand robots working in its factories" by 2025. On the same call he put Optimus's long-term revenue potential above $10 trillion.

What happened: The plan was abandoned by summer 2025, per reporting by The Information, amid difficulties with the robots' hands; Optimus engineering head Milan Kovac left in June 2025. Reporting found no evidence of even hundreds built in 2025. On the Q4 2025 earnings call Musk admitted Tesla had no Optimus robots doing useful work in its factories, and declined to say how many exist. In its Q1 2026 update, Tesla put the start of production on the repurposed Fremont line "later this year," and in July it said the first-generation lines were still being installed. In September The Information reported that the line had reached several hundred robots a week in August, but that the robots still could not handle general tasks. As of late September 2026, Tesla has shown no fleet of several thousand robots doing useful work.

due 31 Dec 2025