Musk: Optimus Robot Will Have Practical Uses Beyond Tesla Next Year
During the latest earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated, "Optimus will have practical uses beyond Tesla next year," reiterating his long-term view that the humanoid robot business is expected to become one of the company's most important and valuable product lines. Previously, Musk mentioned in several public occasions that the current generation of Optimus is still in the simple task phase within factories, and it is expected to first complete more complex industrial roles internally at Tesla before gradually being sold to external manufacturing and general consumers, with a target time frame in the coming years.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
This statement about "being useful beyond Tesla next year" essentially provides the capital market with a time anchor: transitioning from the "internal validation phase" to the "early pilot phase of external commercialization." Once Optimus begins to enter other factories, warehouses, or service scenarios, its revenue structure will expand from simple "capital sales" to higher-margin recurring cash flows such as "robotics as a service" (RaaS), software subscriptions, and remote operations, echoing Tesla's subscription path on FSD.
However, looking back at Musk's past timelines in earnings calls and public events, it is evident that he has repeatedly adjusted the timeline for Optimus's mass production and "useful work": from "doing useful tasks in factories this year" to later admitting that no robots are currently performing economically valuable jobs, and now pushing the "useful for external purposes" timeline to next year. This indicates that the path from demonstration units to scalable deployment products for humanoid robots is constrained by multiple factors such as mechanical reliability, safety standards, task generalization capabilities, and customer site integration, making it much harder to predict accurately than pure software or in-vehicle autonomous driving.
From an industry structure perspective, once Optimus truly lands in external factories and service industries, it will directly enter a multi-faceted game with traditional automation, industrial robots, and the labor market: manufacturers will need to re-evaluate decisions between "labor costs + management costs" and "robot one-time purchase + operational subscription"; unions and regulatory bodies will impose new institutional constraints on safety, job replacement, and labor regulations. For Tesla, this means a transformation from a "car company + energy company" to a "general labor infrastructure provider"; if successful, its asset pricing logic will be closer to that of long-term infrastructure and platform technology companies rather than a single manufacturing enterprise.