Tesla’s bots hit the line as profit slides 43%—Musk’s AI race comes with a gas bill

Tesla said Wednesday that Optimus has entered production at its Fremont, California factory, even as the carmaker’s profit fell 43% last quarter to $787 million from $1.37 billion a year earlier. Revenue stayed flat at $28.05 billion, operating profit fell 56% to $718 million and deliveries declined about 2%, according to Tesla’s quarterly filing.

Research spending rose 69% to $2.76 billion, while capital expenditures, the money spent on factories and equipment, more than doubled to $4.73 billion. The spending is directed toward Optimus, a humanoid robot meant to take over dangerous and repetitive jobs, and Cybercab, a two-seat robotaxi summoned from an app with no steering wheel or pedals.

“The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured,” Tesla wrote in its shareholder letter. CEO Elon Musk said Tesla aims to produce 20,000 Optimus units a week, a milestone that will take at least a year because the design is still changing. He put deliveries to outside customers around the end of 2027 and called the robot’s hand the hardest hardware problem and raised whether it holds up beyond a month of use. Tesla has missed Optimus targets before, including a goal of about 10,000 robots in 2025. Figure AI, a startup backed by Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia, unveiled its Figure 02 humanoid in 2024.

On Cybercab, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering Lars Moravy said on the earnings call: “We’re trying to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year, 2026.” Every Cybercab built so far is headed to Tesla’s own robotaxi fleet, and Musk said most will stay Tesla-owned and be offered as “transport as a service.” Tesla has not said who will buy Cybercabs first, has not announced a price and posted a form last month for people interested in buying robotaxis. The target price Tesla has cited is under $30,000.

Tesla is set to debut its first commercial robotaxi service in Austin, Texas by June, Musk claimed during the company’s April 22 earnings call. The initial rollout will feature 10 to 20 Model Y vehicles equipped with Tesla’s "Full Self-Driving" software, which thus far operates under human supervision, followed by rapid expansion to other U.S. markets later in the year. Musk said the robotaxi business should become noticeable in Tesla’s overall financials in the second quarter of 2027 and will “probably” be “a big deal by Q3 or Q4 of next year.”