Tesla shipped nearly 500,000 vehicles in the last quarter and derived 70% of its revenue from car sales.
Elon Musk spends half his time on earnings calls discussing robots and AI.
This focus persists even as the company’s financials point to a traditional automotive business.
Over the last seven years, TechCrunch and Hudson Labs mapped the topics Musk and other executives raised during quarterly calls.
The researchers used transcripts from S&P Market Intelligence and an AI tool called Co-Analyst to tag and count sentence frequency.
The data shows Musk now discusses artificial intelligence, robotaxis, and Full Self-Driving software nearly 50% of the time he speaks.
That figure was between 15% and 20% in 2022.
Musk previously argued that autonomy justified the company’s high valuation.
“If you value Tesla as just an auto company – fundamentally, it’s the wrong framework,” Musk said on the Q1 call in 2024.
“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.”
Discussions of robotics have risen sharply in the last three years.
Tesla announced work on the humanoid robot Optimus in 2021.
In the year following that announcement, Musk spent around two percent or less of his time talking about the project.
Over the past year, he has spent at least 10% of his remarks on Optimus.
That figure reached nearly a third of his focus on the third-quarter call in 2025.
Musk increased his discussion of these futuristic ideas as Tesla’s core automotive business stopped growing.
He now spends less than a third of his time on earnings calls talking about cars and manufacturing.
On the same third-quarter call last year, Musk spent less than 20% of his time on the automotive business.
Other Tesla executives, including chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja and vice president of engineering Lars Moravy, have been slower to shift their focus.
Even on recent calls, they have spent around 30% of the time on the automotive business.
Their next-most common topics are AI, robotaxi, and Full Self-Driving.
Their attention has shifted, but they lag behind Musk’s enthusiasm for AI and robotics.
Those efforts are not yet generating real returns.
These executives used to spend nearly 50% of their time on these calls making and selling cars.
That changed in 2024 as the car business suffered from competition from legacy automakers and new Chinese entrants.
When they join Musk in talking up the future, they match his rhetoric.
“The path to amazing abundance is ever challenging and requires making bold bets,” Taneja said on the Q2 call this year.
“Our progress will be non-linear. The future is going to be great.”
