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Musk pivots to AI
Elon Musk is spending nearly 50% of his speaking time on Tesla’s quarterly earnings calls on artificial intelligence, robotaxis, and Full Self-Driving, according to TechCrunch’s analysis with Hudson Labs.
“nearly 50% of the time he opens his mouth”
TechCrunch reports that Musk’s focus on those topics rose from about 15% to 20% in 2022, while Tesla shipped nearly half a million cars last quarter and made 70% of its money from car sales.
In the Q1 2024 call, Musk said, “If you value Tesla as just an auto company — fundamentally, it’s the wrong framework,” framing the company’s identity around autonomy rather than vehicles.
The same TechCrunch analysis says Tesla revealed it was working on a humanoid robot known as Optimus in 2021, and that in the year that followed Musk spent only around 2% or less of his time talking about the project.
Over the past year, TechCrunch says Musk has spent at least 10% of his remarks talking up Optimus, with it occupying nearly a third of his focus on the Q3 call in 2025.
Executives lag, Optimus rises
TechCrunch says other Tesla executives on earnings calls, including chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja and vice president of engineering Lars Moravy, have been slower to shift their focus, spending around 30% of the time focusing on the automotive business.
TechCrunch reports that their next-most common topics are AI, robotaxi, and Full Self-Driving, while it says their attention has shifted but they are lagging behind Musk’s enthusiasm for AI and robotics.
In the Q2 call this year, Taneja said, “The path to amazing abundance is ever challenging and requires making bold bets,” and TechCrunch adds that he continued, “Our progress will be nonlinear. The future is going to be great.”
DiarioBitcoin similarly describes an analysis by Hudson Labs that quantifies how much time Musk and other executives dedicate to each topic in earnings calls dating back to 2019.
DiarioBitcoin says the time devoted to the robot Optimus rose from less than 2% in 2022 to more than 10% in the last year, reaching 33% in a recent call.
Valuation bet and investor test
TechCrunch says Musk has been making the case that autonomy justified the company’s soaring value, even as the company’s core automotive business stopped growing.
““If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.””
On the Q1 call in 2024, TechCrunch quotes Musk saying, “If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.”
Benzinga reports that Musk said Tesla’s Optimus “Will Be Epic” in reply to a personal robot question, extending his public push beyond factory work.
Benzinga also says Musk argued that Optimus could eventually account for about 80% of Tesla’s value and become more important than its vehicle business.
DiarioBitcoin adds that Musk wants the world to see Tesla as a company of intelligence artificial and robótica, not as a manufacturer of automobiles, and it cites TechCrunch for the claim that Musk has reduced attention to the automotriz business in investor conferences.