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 AI, robotaxis and Full Self-Driving software, up from 15-20% in 2022.
- Optimus, Tesla's humanoid robot, occupied nearly a third of Musk's remarks on the Q3 2025 earnings call, compared with around 2% in 2022.
- Tesla still earns 70% of its revenue from car sales and shipped nearly half a million vehicles last quarter.
- 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 Musk on a Tesla earnings call these days and you might forget the company sells cars. Nearly half of everything he says covers AI, robotaxis and a humanoid robot named Optimus. Back in 2022, those topics filled only 15 to 20% of his air time.
The finding comes from TechCrunch AI, which worked with Hudson Labs 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 for financial research, which labelled each sentence by topic and tallied how often each theme appeared. We reported on 26 July that Wall Street was already pressing Tesla on whether its AI spending would ever pay off; this data puts numbers on exactly where Musk's attention has been going.
Does any of this match what Tesla actually does?
Not yet. Tesla still makes the vast majority of its money selling cars: nearly half a million shipped last quarter, with car sales accounting for 70% of revenue. Optimus isn't generating income, and there's no commercial robotaxi service yet.
Musk's 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, up from around 2% in 2022, the year after Tesla first revealed it was building a humanoid robot. His argument to investors is blunt: "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're following Musk, but slowly. Taneja and Moravy still put about 30% of their call time into the core car business, roughly the share Musk used to give it a few years ago.
Their shift sharpened in 2024, when slowing car sales and rising pressure from established carmakers and Chinese rivals pushed the automotive business into harder territory. Before that, both executives spent close to 50% of their time on manufacturing and sales. When they do lean into the bigger vision, though, 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. Cars still exist and still get software updates. For investors, Musk's message is direct: he thinks the car business isn't the reason to own the stock. Whether the AI and robotics bets pay off is a separate question, and one the numbers can't yet answer. That's the honest summary of what this data shows, and it's the thing worth watching.
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 hasn't 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 the AI and robotics bets 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 have to judge that claim for themselves.
