Data shows Musk now spends nearly half his Tesla earnings-call time on AI and robots

Elon Musk wants investors 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 recent years arguing Tesla is really an AI and robotics company — even if some of that AI happens to live in cars — with his attention moving decisively toward projects like the Optimus robot and fully autonomous robotaxis as day-to-day carmaker concerns get pushed aside.

To track that shift, TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, which sourced transcripts of Tesla’s quarterly earnings calls dating back to 2019 from S&P Market Intelligence and used its Co-Analyst AI tool to classify the topic of each sentence and count how often it came up.

The data shows Musk now speaks about artificial intelligence, robotaxis, and Full Self-Driving software nearly 50% of the time he talks on these calls, up from roughly 15% to 20% in prior years such as 2022. “If you value Tesla as just an auto company — fundamentally, it’s the wrong framework,” Musk said on the Q1 2024 call. “If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.”

Robotics talk has risen sharply too. Tesla revealed it was working on the Optimus humanoid robot in 2021; the following year, Musk spent around 2% or less of his time on the project. Over the past year he’s spent at least 10% of his remarks on Optimus, reaching nearly a third of his focus on the Q3 2025 call, while his time on cars and manufacturing has dropped to less than a third overall — and less than 20% on that same Q3 2025 call.

Other Tesla executives who join earnings calls, including CFO Vaibhav Taneja and VP of engineering Lars Moravy, have shifted far more slowly: even recent calls still see them spend around 30% of their time on the automotive business, with AI, robotaxi, and Full Self-Driving as their next-most common topics, down from the roughly 50% or more they used to spend on cars before the automotive business started struggling against legacy and Chinese competitors in 2024.

Why it matters

The widening gap between how Musk and his own executives talk about Tesla signals a bet that its market value increasingly rests on unproven AI and robotics projects rather than the car business still generating most of its revenue.