Will Optimus Make Us Forget Tesla Made Cars?

November 14, 2026

Jason Calacanis speaking on stage at CES 2026 about Tesla Optimus 3

“I saw Optimus 3. I can tell you now, nobody will remember that Tesla ever made a car.” That is All-In podcast co-host Jason Calacanis, describing a Sunday visit to Tesla’s Optimus lab with Elon Musk.¹² When @farzyness posted a 45-second clip of the remark in January 2026, it drew more than 550,000 impressions and 8,700 likes.³

This is an opinion piece, and we are treating the quote as a claim to examine, not gospel. We like the ambition. The useful question is a practical one: what would have to be true for a humanoid robot to outshine a car business that has delivered 10 million vehicles?⁴

Video: All-In Podcast footage of Jason Calacanis at CES 2026 (Jan. 6, 2026), as shared by @farzyness.

What Calacanis Actually Said

The remark came during a live All-In taping on the CES 2026 stage on January 6, where Calacanis was interviewing Bob Sternfels, McKinsey’s global managing partner, and Hemant Taneja, the CEO of General Catalyst.⁵⁶ The full episode came out on January 8.¹ In it, he says Musk “is going to make a billion of those,” calls Optimus “the most transformative technology product ever made in the history of humanity,” and predicts “a 1-to-1 ratio of humans to Optimus.”¹²

The full audio adds context. Calacanis opens with “I don’t want to name drop,” a line the viral clip trims, and ends with “I don’t want to speak out of school.”¹⁷³ Moments before, Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst had said robotics “will be slower than people think in terms of really taking hold.”¹ Same stage, opposite forecasts.

Teslarati called the comments “clearly opinion-driven,” but noted they were among the first impressions of Optimus V3 from someone outside Tesla, at a time when the robot had not been shown publicly.⁷ Musk replied to one repost of the clip with two words: “Probably true.”⁸ All-In later posted the clip itself, and a repost by @SawyerMerritt passed 1.4 million impressions.²⁹

The Bar Optimus Has to Clear

Start with what would have to be forgotten. In the third quarter of 2026, Tesla reported $20.56 billion in automotive revenue out of $28.05 billion in total revenue, and said it had produced and delivered its 10 millionth vehicle.⁴ Adding up the last four quarters in that report, automotive revenue comes to about $75 billion.⁴

That is the scale of the thing Calacanis says people will forget. Cars are not a side business at Tesla. In that quarter they were still about three-quarters of the company’s revenue.

The Math of Forgetting

Here is a rough estimate of our own. Musk has said Optimus should cost $20,000 to $30,000 “long term.”¹⁰ At a $25,000 midpoint, matching $75 billion a year would mean selling about 3 million robots a year.

For comparison, research firms Omdia and IDC put total global humanoid sales in 2025 at 13,000 to 18,000 units, across every company, with Tesla at roughly 150.¹¹ The entire world installed about 542,000 industrial robots of all kinds in 2024, and about 4.66 million were in operation.¹² So the bar is more than five times every industrial robot installed worldwide in a year, every year, from one company.

Tesla’s own targets show the gap. Musk said in October 2026 that Tesla has most of a 1-million-unit-per-year line in place in Fremont, and that reaching 20,000 units a week would take “at least a year, maybe a little longer.”¹³ Even at that full rate, about a million robots a year at $25,000 each would be roughly a third of today’s car revenue, by our math.

Where Optimus Stands Now

Optimus schedules have slipped before. Tesla aimed to build at least 5,000 Optimus robots in 2025, but by late July it had made only hundreds, according to The Information as reported by TechCrunch.¹⁴ The target was reportedly cut to 2,000, according to The Information as reported by heise, with hand and forearm redesigns causing much of the delay.¹⁵

Musk has been candid about the pace. He called bringing Optimus to market “an incredibly difficult task,” and in January 2026 he wrote that early Optimus production would be “agonizingly slow” before it gets “insanely fast.”¹⁶¹⁷ That S-curve framing is fair, and it is also a reminder that the steep part has not started yet.

In its October 21, 2026 update, Tesla said Optimus production had begun on high-volume lines in Fremont, and called these “the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured.”⁴¹⁸ On the call, Musk said Tesla is still building robots “that do not have perfected hands,” and that he expects to deliver Optimus to companies outside Tesla around the end of 2027.¹³ He also said a video of Optimus doing tasks that are “not preprogrammed” might be a month or two away.¹³ Tesla said in January that it planned to unveil the Gen 3 version of Optimus in the first quarter of 2026; as of mid-November it had not shown a finished V3 publicly, and its October update does not mention one.¹⁹⁴

What Would Have to Be True

For Calacanis to be right, at least four things have to go well. First, the robot has to be genuinely useful without a person steering it. Musk himself wrote in January that real-world AI for Optimus will be “100X harder than cars.”²⁰

Second, it has to last. Musk listed the AI, the electromechanical design, and the robot’s usage life among the issues he expects to solve around the end of 2027.¹³ A robot that needs a technician every week is an expensive demo, not a product.

Third, the cost has to fall to car-like prices at car-like volumes. Fourth, Tesla has to win against a crowded field. Nearly 90% of the humanoids sold in 2025 were made by Chinese companies, and Musk said at the World Economic Forum in January 2026 that China “will definitely be the toughest competition for Tesla.”¹¹

The Case for the Optimists

The bulls are not making this up from nothing. Morgan Stanley projects that humanoids could number about 1 billion by 2050, with roughly 90% used for industrial and commercial work, in a market it sizes at more than $5 trillion.²¹ In 2024, Goldman Sachs raised its 2035 humanoid market estimate to $38 billion and its shipment estimate to 1.4 million units, saying AI progress “surprised us the most.”²²

Tesla’s shareholders have also tied Musk’s pay to the idea. In November 2025, they approved a Musk pay plan tied partly to delivering 1 million “AI robots” alongside 20 million vehicles.²³ Musk has gone further, writing that “~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus.”²⁴

Notice the gap between these numbers, though. Morgan Stanley’s billion is for every humanoid from every company by mid-century. Calacanis’s billion is for Tesla alone.

What the Replies Got Right

The threads under the clip split along familiar lines, but some replies sharpened the question. @TheStockSurgeon argued that what Calacanis described “isn’t a better robot, it’s a category shift from products to programmable labor.”²⁵ That is the strongest version of the bull case. If a robot can do general physical work, the market is not cars but labor itself.

Others asked for milestones. @Jhawkins_nz wanted a best guess for the quarter when Optimus contributes 5% of Tesla’s earnings.²⁶ @hoffboffin asked whether the world can even mine the materials for a billion robots.²⁷ And @kode11 summed up the skeptics: until robots “ship at scale with real reliability + cost, it’s still hype.”²⁸

Our favorite was @premmpinto: “I’ll remember we made a car. Optimus would never have been possible without our robots on wheels doing it first.”²⁹ We think that is closer to the truth than the clip.

Why the Car May Be Remembered After All

Here is our view, and it is an opinion. The car is not the thing Optimus replaces. It is the thing that taught Tesla how to build Optimus: the factories, the supply chain, the batteries, and the self-driving software that learned to see the world.

Tesla’s own update makes the link plain. It lists its California factory for both Model 3 and Model Y production and the Optimus early ramp, and says Optimus production began on high-volume lines in Fremont.⁴ If Optimus becomes the biggest product in history, the cars will not be forgotten. They will be the reason it happened.

Looking Ahead

Watch for three signals over the next year. The first is the unscripted Optimus video Musk promised, and whether it shows real hand work rather than choreography.¹³ The second is whether Fremont moves from early production toward 20,000 robots a week. The third is the first Optimus deliveries to customers outside Tesla, which Musk expects around the end of 2027.

Bold claims are how big things get built, and we hope Calacanis is directionally right. But “nobody will remember the car” is a prediction, not a result. For now, the most honest version of the quote may be this: if Optimus wins, it will be because Tesla made cars first. Thanks to @farzyness for sharing the clip, and to Jason Calacanis and the All-In podcast for the original conversation.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your cart (items: 0)

Your cart is empty