Elon Musk spends half his time talking robots and AI on Tesla earnings calls
TechCrunch AI Sean O'Kane, Russell Brandom
Data crunch shows Musk now spends nearly half of Tesla earnings calls talking AI, robots, and self-driving, not cars. That's a huge jump from just a few years ago, even though 70% of Tesla's revenue still comes from selling vehicles.
Elon Musk keeps insisting Tesla isn't really a car company anymore. The numbers tell a different story on paper — Tesla moved nearly half a million vehicles last quarter, and 70% of its revenue still comes from selling them. But listen to what Musk actually talks about on earnings calls, and a different picture emerges entirely.
TechCrunch worked with financial research firm Hudson Labs to analyze seven years of Tesla earnings call transcripts using an AI tool called Co-Analyst, which tagged every sentence by topic. The results back up what longtime Tesla watchers have suspected: Musk's attention has drifted hard toward Optimus, robotaxis, and Full Self-Driving, even as the automotive business he still runs has flatlined. Back in 2022, Musk spent maybe 15% to 20% of his call time on AI and autonomy topics. Now it's pushing 50%.
Optimus tells an even starker story. Tesla first showed off the humanoid robot in 2021, and for the following year Musk barely mentioned it — two percent of his remarks, tops. Fast forward to the third quarter of 2025, and Optimus alone ate up nearly a third of everything he said on the call. Meanwhile, cars and manufacturing, the stuff that actually generates Tesla's revenue, got less than 20% of his attention that same quarter.
Other Tesla executives haven't followed him nearly as fast. CFO Vaibhav Taneja and engineering VP Lars Moravy were still spending close to half their remarks on the automotive business as recently as a couple years ago, only pivoting hard toward AI and robotics language after 2024, when Chinese competitors and legacy automakers started eating into Tesla's car sales. That lag probably isn't an accident — Optimus and robotaxis aren't producing real revenue yet, so the finance and engineering side has less reason to obsess over them the way Musk does.
Still, when Tesla's other executives do lean into the robot-and-AI framing, they sound just as grandiose as their boss. Taneja told investors this year that Tesla is chasing "amazing abundance" through "bold bets," progress that will be "non-linear." It's the kind of language that makes more sense for a startup pitching a vision than a company that just sold half a million sedans and SUVs in three months.
My take
Nobody should be shocked that a guy running a robotics side-quest inside a car company talks more about robots than cars — that's just branding math, and Musk has always been better at narrative than at quarterly delivery numbers. The real tell is that his own CFO and engineering chief are still grounded in the actual business, which suggests the robotaxi-and-Optimus talk is aimed less at operations and more at keeping the stock's sci-fi premium alive while the core business gets squeezed by BYD and everyone else.
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