Hajra Naz
Elon Musk wants people to see Tesla differently. He wants you to think of it as more than a car company. But the numbers still tell a different story. Last quarter, Tesla shipped nearly half a million cars. Car sales made up 70% of the company’s revenue.
Even so, Musk has spent years pushing a different narrative. He argues Tesla is really an AI and robotics company. Some of that AI, he says, just happens to live inside cars. Regardless of what the financials show, Musk’s focus has clearly shifted. He’s spending more time on AI-driven projects. Think Optimus, the humanoid robot. Think fully autonomous robotaxis. Meanwhile, the everyday business of building and selling cars seems to matter less to him.
To track this shift, they worked with Hudson Labs. Hudson Labs is a financial research firm based in New York. Together, they analyzed seven years of Tesla’s quarterly earnings calls. The goal was to see what Musk and other Tesla executives actually talk about.
Hudson Labs pulled call transcripts going back to 2019. Those transcripts came from S&P Market Intelligence. The firm then used an AI tool called Co-Analyst. It’s built specifically for detailed financial research. The tool assigned a topic to every sentence spoken. From there, researchers counted how often each topic came up.
The results are striking. Musk now spends almost half of his speaking time on AI-related topics. That includes robotaxis and full self-driving software. Compare that to 2022. Back then, he spent only 15% to 20% of his time on those same topics.
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During this shift, Musk often argued that autonomy explains Tesla’s high valuation. He made this case clearly during Tesla’s Q1 2024 earnings call. He said valuing Tesla as just a car company misses the point entirely. He added that anyone who doubts Tesla will solve autonomy probably shouldn’t invest in the company.
Talk about robotics has also surged. Tesla first revealed the Optimus robot project back in 2021. In the year right after that announcement, Musk barely mentioned it. He spent about 2% or less of his remarks on the robot. That’s changed a lot recently. Over the past year, Optimus has taken up at least 10% of his talking time. During the Q3 2025 call, it made up nearly a third of everything he said.
This shift in focus lines up with a slowdown in Tesla’s core car business. As that growth stalled, Musk pulled back from talking about cars. Today, he spends less than a third of his earnings call time on cars and manufacturing. On that same Q3 2025 call, car-related topics made up less than 20% of his remarks.
Other Tesla executives haven’t shifted nearly as fast. That includes CFO Vaibhav Taneja and VP of engineering Lars Moravy. Even in recent calls, they still spend around 30% of their time on the automotive business. After that, their next most common topics are AI, robotaxis, and full self-driving.
Their focus is changing too, just more slowly than Musk’s. That’s likely because AI and robotics haven’t produced real profits yet. In the past, these executives spent close to half their speaking time, or more, on making and selling cars. That began changing in 2024. Around that time, Tesla’s car business ran into real trouble. Increased competition played a big role, both from established automakers and newer Chinese companies.
Still, when these executives do talk about the future, they echo Musk’s confident tone. Taneja captured that spirit during Tesla’s Q2 earnings call this year. He said the road to real abundance is difficult and demands bold decisions. He acknowledged that progress won’t be steady or predictable. But he insisted the future still looks bright.
