Elon Musk just dropped a pretty bold prediction that could completely change how people think about Tesla.
He said that the humanoid robots they are developing, called Optimus, could eventually make up 80% of Tesla’s total value. That’s a massive shift from thinking of Tesla as just an electric car company.
Those are the biggest factors.
~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus.
This timing is interesting because Tesla’s car sales have been slipping lately, so Musk is essentially betting the company’s future on robotics instead of doubling down on vehicles.
It’s classic Musk, as when one business faces challenges, pivot to something completely different and bigger.
The Optimus robots are still pretty early in development, but Musk is positioning them as Tesla’s next huge growth opportunity.
He is basically saying that while everyone else sees Tesla as a car company that happens to make robots, he sees it as a robotics company that happens to make cars.
Tesla’s Optimus: From concept to future growth engine
Tesla first showed off Optimus back in 2021 and has been refining it ever since, with demos in 2022 and 2023 that showed gradual improvements.
The whole idea is to create a robot that can handle the kind of work that’s either too dangerous, too repetitive, or just plain boring for humans to want to do.
What is smart about Tesla’s approach is that they’re not starting from scratch. They’re taking all the technology they’ve developed for their cars as AI chips, batteries, motors, and autonomous driving software and adapting it for a walking robot.
The pricing Elon Musk is suggesting is actually interesting, as it is somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 per robot.
That’s not cheap, but it’s not completely out of reach for businesses or even some consumers if these things can actually do useful work.
What is more concrete is that Tesla thinks they could start selling these robots to other companies by late 2026.
That’s only a couple of years away, which would be a pretty aggressive timeline for going from prototypes to commercial products that companies would actually pay for.
Visionary potential meets practical hurdles
Wall Street analysts are giving Musk credit for thinking big with Optimus, but they’re not exactly rushing to update their financial models based on his projections.
The consensus seems to be that while humanoid robots could eventually be huge, but we are still talking about years before Tesla sees any real money from this venture.
The skepticism isn’t surprising when you look at Tesla’s track record with bold promises. Remember all the hype around robotaxis?
That was supposed to be generating revenue by now, but we’re still waiting. Analysts have learned to take Musk’s timelines with a pretty big grain of salt.
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