Musk says Tesla’s Optimus robots could go on sale next year

Key topics.Tesla Inc. targets public sales of Optimus by late 2026Robots already working in factories, with complex tasks coming nextMusk bets robots and AI will drive Tesla’s future growth.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.By Ed Ludlow and Kara Carlson.Tesla Inc. will probably sell its Optimus robots to the public by the end of next year, according to Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, who’s said the carmaker’s fortunes will be increasingly dependent on humanoid machines.The company is already using some of the robots to do simple tasks in its factory, Musk said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He predicted Optimus would be “doing more complex tasks” by the end of 2026.Sales to the public will begin when Tesla is “confident that it’s very high reliability, very high safety, and the range of functionality is also very high,” Musk said.The comments offer a more concrete timeline for the future business line, which Musk sees as a key focus for Tesla going forward, alongside artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. The automaker’s core business of selling cars has suffered from a stale product lineup and the loss of EV incentives in the US, leading to two consecutive years of declining deliveries..While Musk regularly talks up the potential of Optimus, he’s been relatively vague about production timelines and targets. During a January 2025 earnings call, he said his “very rough guess” was that Tesla would start delivering Optimus robots to other companies in the second half of 2026.Earlier this week, Musk cautioned that initial production of Optimus and Tesla’s newest vehicle, the Cybercab, will be “agonizingly slow.”Tesla shares rose 1.7% at 11:45 a.m. in New York..Musk’s appearance in Davos came as a surprise after the world’s richest man was confirmed as a last-minute addition to Thursday’s schedule. He’d previously criticized the forum, calling the annual gathering of the world’s elite “boring” and slammed the WEF as a body that’s “increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.”“How is WEF/Davos even a thing? Are they trying to be the boss of Earth!?” he posted on social media in 2022.Musk touched on a variety of topics in his conversation with BlackRock Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink, including data centers in space, robotaxis and power generation bottlenecks..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Musk says Tesla’s Optimus robots could go on sale next year

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