TL;DRMusk told investors Optimus has no supply chain and every part is new, as Tesla quietly dropped mass production language from its Q2 deck
Elon Musk told investors on Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call that Optimus will be “the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla,” warning that the humanoid robot has no existing supply chain and that every component is new. He said he wanted to “calibrate people correctly” on expectations, acknowledging that the initial production ramp will follow a normal curve but with a flat early stretch that could last longer than investors hope. Tesla also quietly removed references to Optimus mass production from its Q2 shareholder presentation, after using that language as recently as the first quarter.
The admission marks a sharp change in tone from previous quarters. Last year Musk said he would be “shocked” if Tesla was not producing 100,000 Optimus robots per month within five years, and in January 2025 he projected 50,000 to 100,000 units for 2026. By January of this year he acknowledged that zero Optimus robots were doing useful work in Tesla’s factories, with the more than one thousand Gen 3 units deployed across Fremont and Gigafactory Texas collecting training data rather than performing productive tasks.
