Elon: Optimus for sale by 2027
Elon Musk said Tesla plans to sell Optimus humanoid robots to the public by end of 2027 and start using them for factory tasks this year — a push Tesla frames as scaling 'physical AI.' Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy also tied Optimus architecture to end‑to‑end approaches used in FSD for high‑framerate hierarchical decision making. (x.com) (x.com)
Musk delivered the timeline at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22, 2026 and said Optimus would be handling “more complex tasks” by the end of 2026. (bloomberg.com) On Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Musk reportedly conceded that no Optimus units were yet “doing useful work” in factories as of January 28, 2026, according to contemporaneous reporting. (electrek.co) In a March 2026 interview at the Abundance Summit (Moonshots with Peter Diamandis), Musk described Optimus Gen‑3 as in its “final stages” and said formal production could begin in summer 2026, with initial volumes low. (youtube.com) Tesla’s recently approved shareholder compensation plan explicitly links Musk’s payouts to large‑scale Optimus targets — the package’s milestones include manufacturing millions of robots (reporting cites a 1‑million‑robots target among the performance goals). (cnbc.com) Tesla VP of AI Ashok Elluswamy has publicly outlined a “neural world simulator” and an end‑to‑end training pipeline that the company says enables FSD models and simulated action‑conditioned video to transfer to Optimus for closed‑loop testing. (humanoidsdaily.com) Elluswamy’s conference talks (ICCV 2025 and ScaledML 2026) included implementation details used in Tesla’s presentations — demonstrations of the simulator, its closed‑loop evaluation role, and Q&A notes referencing control command timing (a reported control command frequency of ~36 Hz appeared in a ScaledML session description). (youtube.com)
