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. By the Q1 2026 call, first robots off the repurposed Fremont line had slipped to "later this year." As of August 2026, neither the several thousand robots nor the useful work has materialised.
due 31 Dec 2025
Report of Tesla Q4 2024 earnings call, Jan 29 2025 · archived