Elon Musk went on a media blitz to share plans on new robotics benchmarks and reiterate his commitment to Tesla.
The Tesla CEO spoke briefly with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the Microsoft Build conference on Monday, made a remote appearance at Bloomberg’s Qatar Economic Forum, and appeared on CNBC twice on Tuesday.
At the Qatar Economic Forum, Musk said he is committed to leading Tesla for at least five more years, and said robotaxis will be rolled out in June as previously planned.
“Yes, no doubt about that at all,” Musk said during a video call when asked about his leadership.
Tesla shares remained mostly unchanged after markets closed Tuesday, but they rebounded in May compared to previous months after Musk said he would scale back his involvement with DOGE on April 22. However, Tesla shares are still down in 2025 thus far, following revenue and income declines in Q1.
Representatives for Tesla did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Here are the main takeaways on robotics from Musk’s interviews.
A ‘prudent’ approach
Musk was asked about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Supervised software running a red light during a test drive by BI reporters and stressed the slow rollout of robotaxis for safety reasons
“I think it’s prudent for us to start with a small number, confirm that things are going well, and then scale it up proportionate to how well we see it’s doing,” Musk told CNBC host David Faber.
Musk said they are now testing robotaxis “driving 24/7 with drivers in the cars” with “essentially no interventions,” but he prefers caution because it would be “the first introduction of unsupervised full self-driving.”
“We want to deliberately take it slow,” Musk added. “We could start with 1,000 or 10,000 on day one, but I don’t think that would be prudent. So we will start with probably 10 for a week, then increase it to 20, 30, 40.”
Musk said that the goal would be to have 1,000 robotaxis within a few months in Austin, before expanding the operation to other cities like Los Angeles and San Antonio.
Though Musk did not directly address BI’s reporting that the FDS made a critical error, he said Tesla’s robotaxis will be geo-fenced to select areas of Austin. Alphabet’s Waymo also limits its autonomous cars to specific zones.
“It’s not going to take intersections unless we are highly confident,” Musk told Faber. “Or it will just take a route around that intersection.”
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The future of Optimus
Musk is expecting to scale up the use of humanoid robots quickly.
“We expect to have thousands of Optimus robots working in Tesla factories by the end of this year, beginning this fall,” Musk told Faber on CNBC, “And we expect to scale Optimus up faster than any product, I think, in history, to get to millions of units per year as soon as possible.”
“I think we feel confident in getting to one million units per year in less than five years, maybe four years. So by 2030, I feel confident in predicting one million Optimus units per year — it might be 2029,” Musk added.
Musk told Faber that Optimus will also be the “biggest product ever” with “insatiable” demand because “everyone” would want one.
“It’s going to take a lot of compute resources and it’ll take time,” said Musk when asked what it would take to train a robot, “I think there’s certain threshold breakthroughs that we think we can achieve.”
In a short conversation with Microsoft CEO Nadella, Musk also reiterated that all kinds of robotics, including robotaxis and the humanoid robot Optimus, need to be “grounded in reality.”
“As you mentioned with the car, it needs to drive safely and correctly. The humanoid robot Optimus needs to perform the task that it’s being asked to perform,” Musk told Nadella.
The market reacts
Musk’s media blitz generated a lukewarm response from investors. Tesla shares rose around 0.5% at market closing on Tuesday compared to the day before, but stocks began to dip in the after-hours.
Musk has teased his plan to bring humanoid robots to market for years. In 2021, a dancing actor in a body suit gave us our first look at Optimus, also known as Tesla Bot. By 2022, a rough prototype was up and walking at the company’s Artificial Intelligence Day event.
In October 2024, Business Insider’s Hasan Chowdhury reported that Tesla’s robotics technology has advanced since its early days. Chowdhury reported that Optimus prototypes at last year’s Tesla’s robotaxi day played rock-paper-scissors with the audience, poured drinks, and danced, though some attendees thought the bots were controlled by human operators.
As far as the timeline goes, Musk said in a post on X last July that Tesla would have “genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year,” and larger-scale production enabling sales to other companies by 2026. Now, midway through 2025, large-scale production has not yet been announced, but in the company’s Q1 2025 Update letter, Tesla said it is “on track” for its builds of Optimus on its Fremont pilot production line in 2025, “with wider deployment of bots doing useful work across our factories.”
Musk has been wrong about timelines before. In 2018, he acknowledged that he tends to be overly optimistic about when his creations will come to market. In some instances, consumers are still waiting for his promises to come to fruition.
In 2019, Musk said Tesla would deploy over one million robotaxis by the end of 2020. While that hasn’t yet materialized, the planned debut of its robotaxi service in Austin later this year gets Tesla a small step closer to that goal.
Still, if Tesla’s robotics division manages to deliver on all it has promised with Optimus and its other applications, it’d be a major boon for the company — and its investors. Tesla bull and Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives has predicted that robotaxis will be a game changer for Tesla, and estimated that it could become a $2 trillion company within the next two years. Ives told CNBC on Tuesday that he believes 90% of Tesla’s future value lies in its autonomous vehicle software and robotics division.
