Elon Musk admitted on Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call today that the company doesn’t have any Optimus robots doing useful work in its factories right now.
This is a striking admission, given that Musk has spent the past two years claiming the opposite.
What Musk said before
Let’s take a walk through memory lane.
June 2024: Tesla’s official account claimed the company had “2 Optimus bots performing tasks in the factory autonomously.”
June 2024: At Tesla’s shareholder meeting, Musk said he expected “a thousand to a couple thousand robots working in its factories” by 2025.
January 2025: On Tesla’s Q4 2024 earnings call, Musk raised the stakes even higher:
“The normal internal plan calls for roughly 10,000 Optimus robots to be built this year.”
He added:
“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.”
Today (January 2026): Musk admitted that no Optimus robots are currently doing useful work in Tesla’s factories.
“Well, we are still very much at the early stages of Optimus. It’s still in the R&D phase. We have had Optimus do some basic tasks in the factory. But as we iterate on new versions of Optimus, we deprecate the old versions. It’s not in usage in our factories in a material way. It’s more so that the robot can learn. We wouldn’t expect to have any kind of significant Optimus production volume until probably the end of this year.”
The pattern
This follows a now-familiar pattern with Musk’s predictions.
We documented last month that Tesla never came close to producing thousands of Optimus robots in 2025. There was no evidence of even hundreds being built.
During the earnings call, Musk was specifically asked about how many Optimus robots Tesla has, and he didn’t answer.
What Tesla has demonstrated publicly are robots performing simple tasks like handing out water bottles, and even then, they relied heavily on teleoperation (humans remotely controlling the robots) rather than true autonomy.
Multiple supply chain reports throughout 2025 indicated that Tesla’s Optimus program was in “shambles,” with the head of the program departing and production being delayed.
Tesla Optimus Gen 3
In today’s shareholder update, Tesla did mention progress on Optimus:
“In Q1 of this year, we plan to unveil the Gen 3 version of Optimus, which will include major upgrades from version 2.5, including our latest hand design. The Gen 3 is our first design meant for mass production.”
Tesla also said it’s preparing production lines with “start of production planned before the end of 2026 and eventual planned capacity of 1 million robots per year.”
But the admission that no robots are currently doing useful work directly contradicts years of claims from both Musk and Tesla’s official communications.
Electrek’s Take
I want to be clear: I’m actually bullish on humanoid robots. The technology is advancing rapidly, and Tesla does have advantages in compute efficiency and AI development.
But Tesla is running full speed ($20 billion capex worth) into the same problem it had with autonomous vehicles: it builds the hardware before the software is ready.
On top of this, even though I’m bullish on humanoid (to a degree, I’m not saying its a multi-trillion dollar industry), I don’t really trust Musk leading this effort with this real credibility problem.
When Musk claimed in January 2025 that “several thousand Optimus robots will be doing useful things by the end of the year,” he wasn’t making a long-term prediction about uncertain technology. He was making a near-term operational claim about his own company.
Now, a year later, he’s admitting that the number is zero.
Meanwhile, Tesla claimed had Optimus robots were doing “real work” in factories almost two years ago now.
It’s fairly clear for anyone who has been following the program closely that Tesla is still years away from a useful product that will be able to perform work at an efficient level beyond just demos.
Even Musk appeared to somewhat admits that he the first part of his response where he said that the robot is “still very much at the early stages of Optimus. It’s still in the R&D phase.”
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