Elon Musk says that Tesla aims to build 10,000 Optimus robots this year, but he admits that it is an ambitious goal.
With Tesla’s automotive business being down last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk turned again to humanoid robots to stoke positivity amongst investors.
During the conference call following the release of its Q4 2024 earnings, Musk claimed that Tesla is aiming to build 10,000 Optimus robots in 2025:
The normal internal plan calls for roughly 10,000 Optimus robots to be built this year.
However, he highlighted that it is an internal goal and it’s more likely that Tesla will end up building a few thousand units. But he also says that those units would be performing useful work at Tesla:
“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. Will those several thousand Optimus robots be doing useful things by the end of the year? Yes, I’m confident they will do useful things.”
Tesla already announced that it has a few Optimus prototypes working at its factory, but we haven’t seen significant evidence of that.
For the most part, Tesla has only demoed robots being teleoperated by humans.
Musk then made some even wilder comments about Optimus, claiming that “it won’t be long before Tesla is making 100 million of these things a year.”
He claimed that he believes the Optimus program will eventually account for the vast majority of Tesla’s revenues.
The CEO added that Tesla is currently designing a production live for 1,000 units a month. The next line will be capable of 10,000 units a month. Tesla is working on a version 2 of Optimus that Musk claims will be produced at a rate of 100,000 units per month and it will launch next year.
Speaking of next year, Musk said that it is when Tesla plans to start selling the robot to third-parties rather than only using them itself.
In terms of pricing, the CEO said he sees the robot selling for less than $20,000 once it is produced at a rate of 1 million units per year.
Electrek’s Take
I’m actually bullish on Optimus and humanoid robots in general. We have the robotics technology to make useful robots, and AI is advancing fast enough that it makes sense to deploy it in humanoid form that can take over human tasks rather than specialized robots that require changes in the working environment.
The humanoid form lets you lower deployment costs, as you don’t need to change anything else.
I do see Tesla having several expertise, giving it advantages in developing humanoid robots, but I’m not willing to say that it will be the most impactful company in space. There are already several competitors.
I think it’s safe to cut all the numbers Elon shared in half and pushed the timeline a few years back.