Forget margins. Elon Musk wants to reinvent society with a robot that can walk, work, operate without sleep, and—according to him—perform surgery with precision so humanlike, you'll need to poke it just to make sure it's not a person in a suit.
Speaking on Tesla Inc.'s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Q3 2025 earnings call last month, Musk doubled down on his sky-high ambitions for Optimus, the company's humanoid robot project. The Tesla CEO called it "an infinite money glitch," predicting it would not only become a key revenue stream for the company—but possibly the most transformative product Tesla has ever built.
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"Optimus at scale is the infinite money glitch," Musk said. "If Optimus achieves five times the productivity of a person per year because it can operate 24/7… that's why I called it the infinite money glitch."
But for Musk, the upside isn't just financial. It's existential.
"With Optimus and self-driving, we can actually create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care," he said. Then he dropped this: "Optimus will be an incredible surgeon. Imagine if everyone had access to an incredible surgeon."
Musk claimed on the call that Tesla could eventually build Optimus at a scale rivaling vehicle production—"millions per year"—despite the fact that a global supply chain for humanoid robots doesn't exist. "With a humanoid robot, there is no supply chain," he said. "Tesla has to be vertically integrated very deep into the supply chain because it just doesn't exist."
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That also means building the hardware in-house, especially the robot's hand and forearm—something Musk said is "more difficult than the rest of the robot combined." Mimicking the dexterity of a human hand, he explained, is a "crazy electromechanical challenge," but necessary if Optimus is going to handle real-world tasks.
Still, Musk's boldest claim wasn't about motors or actuators—it was how natural Optimus will seem.
"It won't even seem like a robot," he said. "It'll seem like a person in a robot suit… so real that you'll need to poke it to believe it's actually a robot."
While critics might roll their eyes, Musk framed Optimus not as a sideshow to Tesla's vehicle business but as a centerpiece of its AI strategy. With the same real-world intelligence powering Tesla's full self-driving software, Optimus is being built on the company's full AI stack. That stack, he claims, is accelerating faster than ever thanks to a new in-house chip—AI5—designed for 40x performance over the previous generation.
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And yes, the robot army comment came up.
"My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?" Musk said. "I don't feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence."
So what's next? Musk said a new version of Optimus—Optimus B3—will likely debut in Q1 2026. In the meantime, prototypes are already walking the halls of Tesla's engineering headquarters 24/7, able to guide guests to conference rooms upon request.
"I don't want to downplay the difficulty," Musk admitted. "But this is the game plan."
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