Elon Musk now spends half his Tesla earnings calls talking about AI and robots
A seven-year analysis of Tesla earnings transcripts shows Musk's words have drifted far from cars, and his executives are struggling to keep up.
Key points
- Elon Musk now devotes close to 50% of his Tesla earnings call remarks to artificial intelligence, robotaxis and Full Self-Driving software, up from 15-20% in 2022.
- Talk of the Optimus humanoid robot occupied nearly a third of Musk's remarks on the Q3 2025 earnings call, up from roughly 2% in 2022.
- Tesla still earns 70% of its revenue from car sales and shipped nearly half a million vehicles last quarter.
- Other Tesla executives, including CFO Vaibhav Taneja and VP of engineering Lars Moravy, still spend around 30% of their call time on the automotive business.
- Hudson Labs, a New York financial research firm, used an AI tool to tag and count topics sentence-by-sentence across earnings transcripts going back to 2019.
Listen to Elon Musk on a Tesla earnings call these days and you might forget the company sells cars. Nearly half of everything he says is about artificial intelligence, robotaxis, and a humanoid robot called Optimus. That is a dramatic change from 2022, when those same topics took up only 15 to 20% of his air time.
The finding comes from TechCrunch AI, which worked with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, to comb through seven years of Tesla earnings call transcripts. Hudson Labs fed the transcripts, sourced from S&P Market Intelligence and dating to 2019, into its Co-Analyst tool, an AI assistant built specifically for financial research, which labelled each sentence by topic and counted how often each theme appeared.
Does any of this match what Tesla actually does?
Not quite yet. Tesla still makes the vast majority of its money the old-fashioned way: selling cars. The company shipped nearly half a million vehicles last quarter, and car sales account for 70% of its revenue. Neither the Optimus robot nor a commercial robotaxi service is generating meaningful income at this point.
Musk's own words, though, have moved firmly into the future. On the Q3 2025 earnings call, he spent less than 20% of his remarks on the automotive business. Optimus alone filled nearly a third of his comments on that call, compared with around 2% back in 2022, the year after Tesla first revealed it was building a humanoid robot.
His argument, made repeatedly to investors, is that judging Tesla as a car company misses the point entirely. "If you value Tesla as just an auto company, fundamentally, it's the wrong framework," he told analysts on the Q1 2024 call.
What are the other Tesla executives actually saying?
They are following Musk, but at a slower pace. CFO Vaibhav Taneja and VP of engineering Lars Moravy still put about 30% of their call time into the core car business. That is roughly the same share Musk used to give it a few years ago.
Their shift happened sharply in 2024, when the car business slowed down under pressure from established carmakers and new Chinese rivals. Before that, they were spending close to 50% of their call time on manufacturing and sales.
When they do lean into the bigger vision, the language matches Musk's ambition. "The path to amazing abundance is ever challenging and requires making bold bets," Taneja said on the Q2 2025 call. "Our progress will be non-linear. The future is going to be great."
What does this mean for ordinary Tesla buyers and investors?
If you own a Tesla or are thinking of buying one, nothing changes today. The cars still exist and still get software updates. But if you are an investor, Musk is being direct: he thinks the car business is not the reason to own the stock. Whether the AI and robotics bets pay off is a separate question, and one the numbers cannot yet answer.
Common questions
How did Hudson Labs actually measure what Musk talks about?
The firm used an AI tool called Co-Analyst to read every sentence in Tesla earnings call transcripts from 2019 onward, assign each sentence a topic, and count how often each theme came up across all speakers.
Is Tesla's Optimus robot available to buy?
No. Optimus is still in development. Tesla has demonstrated prototypes but has not launched a commercial product or reported any revenue from the robot.
Should Tesla investors be worried about this shift in focus?
That depends on whether you believe the AI and robotics bets will eventually pay off. Right now, cars are still the business. Musk's repeated message is that autonomy and robotics are where the long-term value will come from, but investors must judge that claim for themselves.
