As Tesla promotes product Musk predicted 80% of value will come from, costs jump

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has predicted that Optimus robots will eventually make up for more than three-quarters of the automaker’s value.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, in September 2025, Tesla CEO wrote, "~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus." And this was not the first time that Musk made an upbeat prediction on Optimus robots.

Ever since Tesla revealed that it was working on a humanoid robot known as Optimus in 2021, Musk has spent years making the case that Tesla is really an AI and robotics company. Analysts see his attention move decisively to the AI parts of the company, which includes projects like Optimus robot and fully autonomous robotaxis.

In mid-2024, at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting, CEO Musk had told shareholders that humanoid robots could lift the company’s market cap to $25 trillion at an unspecified future date. Musk said that Optimus could be the catalyst for lifting Tesla’s market cap to $25 trillion someday. Musk, however, didn’t provide a time frame for reaching $25 trillion.

Optimus production comes to Fremont

This week, Tesla announced that the company has started production of its Optimus humanoid robot at its factory in Fremont, California, a manufacturing space once dedicated to making electric vehicles (EVs). The company announced the same in a letter to shareholders.

"Optimus production began in Fremont on our high-volume lines. The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured. While we will continue to iterate on the hardware and manufacturing process, we have proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product," reads the letter.

Tesla made the Optimus production announcement during its third-quarter results that saw the company reporting 16% year-over-year decline in revenue from its solar and energy storage business to $2.8 billion.

There was some positive revenue growth in its services business, a category that includes customer subscriptions to its Full Self-Driving advanced driver-assistance software. Tesla’s services business grew 33% year-over-year, bringing in $4.6 billion and accounting for a record $734 million in gross profit for the quarter.

That forward-looking development wasn’t, however, enough to lift the company’s third-quarter earnings. Tesla reported $787 million in net income, a 43% drop from the same period in 2025, when it earned $1.37 billion.

According to analysts, none of the revenue gain was enough to outpace Tesla’s spending on artificial intelligence projects and its Optimus robot, which is said to have taken a big bite out of profits.

Elon Musk 'admits' ride will be bumpy

On a conference call, Musk said that he considers Optimus production as "early" right now and that the ramp will be slow and "somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product."

He nonetheless claimed that Tesla will be able to make 20,000 of them per week by the end of 2027.

“There’s still some things we need to tweak about the design, because you need to deliver a robot that is safe and reliable and has a long duration, so it can’t, like, wear out after a month,” he said.

“And there’s still quite a lot of work to do with regard to the AI and the robot for it to be truly useful for open-ended tasks,” he added.