Musk admits no Optimus robots are doing 'useful work' at Tesla, even as Gen 3 reveal nears.

On Tesla's Q4 2025 earnings call on January 28, Elon Musk made a striking admission: the company does not currently have any Optimus robots doing useful work in its factories. 'It's not in usage in our factories in a material way. It's more so that the robot can learn,' Musk said, adding that Optimus remains 'very much at the early stages' and 'still in the R&D phase.' The candor stands out because Musk had spent two years claiming the opposite — including a January 2025 pledge that 'several thousand' Optimus robots would be doing useful things by the end of that year.

The forward guidance, however, was aggressive. Tesla said it plans to unveil the Gen 3 version of Optimus in Q1 2026 — its 'first design meant for mass production' — incorporating a new hand design and major upgrades over version 2.5. The company reiterated that it is standing up production lines with start of production planned before the end of 2026 and an eventual targeted capacity of one million robots per year. Reporting around the call also noted Tesla intends to repurpose Model S and Model X lines at Fremont for Optimus.

The gap between the admission and the ambition is the whole story. Independent reporting through 2025 suggested Tesla built only a few hundred Optimus units against a stated 10,000 target, that public demos leaned heavily on teleoperation, and that the program had suffered leadership departures and delays. Musk declined to answer directly when asked on the call how many robots Tesla currently has — a conspicuous omission for a company that treats Optimus as a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.

For the category, Tesla's reset is clarifying. As Boston Dynamics ships committed fleets and Apptronik and Figure tout named customers, Tesla is publicly acknowledging it is still learning rather than deploying. That does not erase Tesla's structural advantages in compute and manufacturing, but it recalibrates expectations: the credibility premium in humanoids is shifting toward companies with real order books, and Tesla's task in 2026 is to convert a Gen 3 reveal into verifiable, autonomous work — not another demo.