Tesla will probably sell its Optimus robots to the public by the end of next year, according to chief executive Elon Musk, who has said the carmaker’s fortunes will be increasingly dependent on humanoid machines.
The company is already using some of the robots to do simple tasks in its factory, Mr Musk said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He predicted Optimus would be “doing more complex tasks” by the end of 2026.
Sales to the public will begin when Tesla is “confident that it’s very high reliability, very high safety, and the range of functionality is also very high”, Mr Musk said.
The comments offer a more concrete timeline for the future business line, which Mr Musk sees as a key focus for Tesla going forward, alongside artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. The automaker’s core business of selling cars has suffered from a stale product lineup and the loss of EV incentives in the US, leading to two consecutive years of declining deliveries.
While Mr Musk regularly talks up the potential of Optimus, he has been relatively vague about production timelines and targets. During a January 2025 earnings call, he said his “very rough guess” was that Tesla would start delivering Optimus robots to other companies in the second half of 2026.
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Earlier this week, Mr Musk cautioned that initial production of Optimus and Tesla’s newest vehicle, the Cybercab, will be “agonizingly slow.”
Tesla shares rose 1.7 per cent in late morning trading in New York.
Mr Musk’s appearance in Davos came as a surprise after the world’s richest man was confirmed as a last-minute addition to Thursday’s schedule. He’d previously criticised the forum, calling the annual gathering of the world’s elite “boring” and slammed the WEF as a body that’s “increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want”.
He touched on a variety of topics in his conversation with BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink, including data centres in space, robotaxis and power generation bottlenecks.
Meanwhile, rocket maker SpaceX is lining up investment bankers at four Wall Street firms for leading roles on a blockbuster initial public offering, expected to be one of the largest new listings ever.
Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are being lined up for senior roles leading the IPO, according to people familiar with the matter.
SpaceX executives have held meetings with bankers in recent weeks as the company prepares for an IPO as soon as this year. The group is currently conducting a sale of existing shares that would value it at around $800 billion (€681 billion).
Other banks are also likely to land roles on the listing, the people said, cautioning that no final decisions had been taken and the situation could yet change.
A SpaceX IPO would seek to raise tens of billions of dollars, probably surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion raise in 2019 to become the largest ever public listing. – Bloomberg