Elon Musk spends half his time talking robots and AI on Tesla earnings calls
Elon Musk wants you to believe Tesla is no longer a car company, even if it’s still shaped like one. The company shipped nearly half
Elon Musk wants you to believe Tesla is no longer a car company, even if it’s still shaped like one. The company shipped nearly half a million cars last quarter and made 70% of its money from car sales. Still, Musk has spent the last few years making the case that Tesla is really an AI and robotics company, even if some of the AI happens to live in cars. And whatever the company financials suggest, Musk’s attention has been moving decisively to the AI parts of the company — projects like the Optimus robot and fully autonomous robotaxis— as the everyday concerns of a carmaker get pushed to the side. To show how that shift happened, TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, to map what Musk and Tesla’s other executives have spent the last seven years talking about on the company’s quarterly earnings calls. The startup sourced transcripts of the calls from S&P Market Intelligence dating back to 2019 and used its Co-Analyst — an AI tool purpose-built for high-precision financial research — to determine a topic for each sentence, before counting their frequency.
The data shows that Musk now speaks about artificial intelligence, along with robotaxis and Full Self-Driving software, nearly 50% of the time he opens his mouth. That’s up from prior years, like in 2022, when he typically spent 15%-20% of the time on those efforts. Over the same period, Musk was often making the case that autonomy justified the company’s soaring value. “If you value Tesla as just an auto company – fundamentally, it’s the wrong framework,” Musk said on the Q1 call in 2024. “If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.” Talk of robotics has shot up sharply in the last three years, too. Tesla revealed it was working on a humanoid robot known as Optimus in 2021. In the year that followed, Musk only spent around two percent or less of his time talking about the project. Over the past year, though, he’s spent at least 10% of his remarks talking up Optimus, with it occupying nearly a third of his focus on the third-quarter call in 2025.
Musk ramped up how often he talks about these futuristic ideas at the same time that Tesla’s core automotive business stopped growing. As a result, he now spends less than a third of his time on earnings calls talking about cars and manufacturing. On that same third-quarter call last year, Musk spent less than 20% of his time talking about the automotive business. The other Tesla executives who appear on the company’s earnings calls, like chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja and vice president of engineering Lars Moravy, have been much slower to shift their focus. Even on some of the most recent calls, they have spent around 30% of the time focusing on the automotive business, with their next-most common topics being AI, robotaxi, and Full Self-Driving. Their attention has shifted, but they are lagging behind Musk’s enthusiasm for AI and robotics, most likely because those efforts aren’t yet generating any real returns. These other Tesla executives used to spend nearly 50% of their time on these calls (or more) talking about making and selling cars.
The BriefWire