As Elon Musk Preps Tesla’s Optimus for Prime Time, Big Hurdles Remain
The Takeaway
- Optimus staff repeatedly talked Musk out of overambitious production goals this year
- Tesla staff have discussed long-term plans to integrate Optimus deeply with xAI and SpaceX
- Three executives are splitting leadership of Optimus teams since departure of engineering chief
When Elon Musk takes the stage at Tesla’s annual meeting next month, one of the centerpieces of his plan to impress shareholders will be a dancing troupe of Optimus bots, the humanoid machines that he says will eventually eclipse Tesla’s electric vehicle business, which is suffering from flagging sales growth. Behind the scenes, however, the Optimus program has been embroiled in technical problems.
Targets Musk set for Tesla to make thousands of the Optimus robots this year were abandoned by the summer, according to two people with direct knowledge of the Optimus program, a reflection of the difficulty Tesla has had with the hands for the robots.
Much is at stake. In September, Musk said Optimus would eventually account for 80% of Tesla’s value. Musk has put his own compensation on the line. At the shareholder meeting next month, shareholders will vote on whether to approve a pay package worth up to $1 trillion for Musk, which depends in part on Tesla’s success in deploying a million robots within the next 10 years. On Monday, Tesla published a video on its X account in which several versions of Optimus urged shareholders to approve Musk’s compensation package.
Musk’s ambitions for the robot cut across his empire of public and private companies. Internally, Tesla has plans to integrate the Optimus bot more deeply with Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, another person with direct knowledge of the program said. (Tesla investors will vote on a shareholder proposal that Tesla invest in xAI at the annual meeting next month, though the board of Tesla isn’t recommending a vote either way.)
Musk has also shared images of the two-legged machines walking around and building structures on Mars, where he hopes SpaceX will land a rocket in 2027. He wants Optimus to be on board a planned Mars trip, due to blast off late next year.
There’s only one issue with that plan: the current version of Optimus has been designed for indoor use on Earth, said a person with direct knowledge of the program. It’s unlikely to be able to do anything on Mars unless it wears a space suit and has a redesigned thermal management system fit for a dusty planet where the average temperature is around negative 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the person said.
Cut 2025 Targets
Tesla’s ambitions for Optimus production waned through the year. The company started 2025 with a goal of producing thousands of robots this year, two people with direct knowledge said, up from several dozen in 2024, one of the people said.
In March, Musk said at an all-hands meeting that the company would build at least 5,000 robots in 2025. But Tesla staffers dedicated to Optimus repeatedly told Musk the timelines and goals he set out to scale up production of the robot were overambitious, according to the two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
Tesla slashed its production goal to 2,000 a few months later, one of the people said. Then, during the summer, staffers told Musk Tesla could meet the 2,000 target, but the robots wouldn’t be very useful due to issues with their hands, the most technically challenging part of their engineering, the person said. As a result, Tesla abandoned plans to produce thousands of bots this year and instead decided to further improve the robot with better hands and other design changes, the person said.
It couldn’t be learned whether Tesla has made meaningful progress since the summer, although Musk acknowledged last month on the “All-In” podcast in September that Tesla was “struggling with the final design of the hardware” and that “the hands inclusive of the forearm are a majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot.”
Tesla has not publicly shown the new version of the robot, which Musk has taken to calling V3. “We haven’t shown Optimus V3 yet. It is sublime,” Musk wrote on X in September.
The Optimus delays and redesign coincided with the departure of Milan Kovac, who was head of engineering for the bot until he left the company in June. Now, Konstantinos Laskaris leads Optimus hardware design, Ashok Elluswamy leads software and Lars Moravy leads manufacturing, according to one of the people with direct knowledge. While Laskaris exclusively works on Optimus, Elluswamy and Moravy also work on Tesla vehicles. All three report to Musk.
Musk said on “All-In” that he probably spends “more mental cycles” on Optimus than on any other single project. He has been intensely involved with the program, including meeting with the Optimus group at least once every week or two over the past year in Palo Alto, Calif., where he receives detailed briefings on the design and manufacturing process, two of the people with direct knowledge of the program said.
Some robotics staff at Tesla have questioned whether building a robot in humanoid form makes sense, given the complexity of designing hands—a debate that’s playing out across the industry.
A big reason Tesla is pursuing a humanoid design is that there are billions of videos of humans performing every conceivable task across the internet, which Tesla hopes to eventually use to train Optimus for every task a human can do, a person with direct knowledge said. That plan will only work if Optimus is as close to the size and shape of the average human as possible, so Tesla has designed the bot to be approximately the height of an average person, the person said.
Still, there are huge technical hurdles involved in making random videos of humans useful for training Optimus, and Tesla has so far trained the robots using videos of its own employees doing things like walking around and performing household chores.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Robot Scientists
In the near term, Tesla’s goal is to deploy as many Optimus robots as possible to perform repetitive industrial tasks inside its own factories. Optimus robots are currently doing basic tasks like sorting batteries in Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., factory, according to videos the company has shared publicly. The bots are also walking around inside the plant on security patrols, according to one of the people with direct knowledge.
Beyond the plan to send Optimus on SpaceX’s first Mars mission—which Musk wants to begin next year, though he has cautioned there may be delays—staff have also discussed other futuristic ways to use the robot through integration with another one of his companies, xAI.
Optimus can already use the Grok chatbot made by Musk’s xAI to speak, a feature Musk has touted on X. Eventually, Tesla envisions using more-advanced versions of Grok and Optimus to replace white-collar workers at the company, including scientists, according to a person with direct knowledge. Tesla staff have discussed having Optimus one day perform hands-on experiments in laboratories using a more advanced and specialized version of Grok as its brain, the person said.
In the meantime, Tesla is facing mounting competition from other companies including Meta Platforms and Amazon, both of which are pushing into humanoid robotics. There are also several other startups, including Figure AI and 1X, that are raising billions of dollars to build humanoids for home and industrial uses.
At The Information’s AI Agenda Live summit in New York last week, 1X CEO Bernt Børnich was asked what advantage his company has over rivals like Tesla and Meta Platforms. “The simple answer is a working product,” he said.