ANALYSIS Tesla's quarterly earnings calls have become the clearest artifact of a company trying to swap its valuation basis in real time — from electric vehicles to AI and robotics — even as the legacy business still funds the entire operation.
Why it matters
Tesla shipped nearly half a million cars last quarter and made 70% of its money from car sales1. Yet Elon Musk now speaks about artificial intelligence, robotaxis, and Full Self-Driving software nearly 50% of the time on earnings calls, up from 15% to 20% in 2022. ◆ The gap between where Tesla's revenue comes from and where its CEO directs investor attention is the defining tension in the company's narrative — and it has consequences for how the market prices the stock.
The big picture
TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, to map what Musk and Tesla's other executives have spent the last seven years talking about on quarterly earnings calls. Hudson Labs sourced transcripts from S&P Market Intelligence dating back to 2019 and used its Co-Analyst — an AI tool purpose-built for high-precision financial research — to determine a topic for each sentence, before counting their frequency.
The data reveals a steady migration. Musk now spends less than a third of his time on earnings calls talking about cars and manufacturing6. On the third-quarter call in 2025, he spent less than 20% of his time talking about the automotive business. In that same Q3 2025 call, the Optimus humanoid robot occupied nearly a third of Musk's focus4. Over the past year, Musk has spent at least 10% of his remarks talking up Optimus, a project Tesla revealed in 2021 that consumed about 2% or less of his attention in 2022.
Musk has been explicit about the reframing. On the Q1 call in 2024, he said that valuing Tesla as just an auto company is "the wrong framework" and that people who do not believe Tesla will solve autonomy "should not be investors in the company".
ANALYSIS That framing is not merely rhetorical; it is an instruction to the market about which discount rate to apply.
Between the lines
The rest of Tesla's executive bench has not moved as fast. Tesla's other executives — including CFO Vaibhav Taneja and VP of engineering Lars Moravy — used to spend nearly 50% of their time on calls talking about making and selling cars. On some of the most recent calls, they have spent around 30% of the time focusing on the automotive business. ◆ The slower shift among the operational executives suggests the day-to-day reality of running Tesla still revolves around vehicles, even as Musk steers the investor narrative elsewhere.
On the Q2 call this year, Taneja offered language that echoed Musk's futurism: "The future is going to be great. Our progress will be non-linear. The path to amazing abundance is ever challenging and requires making bold bets".
Tesla's car business started to suffer in 2024 thanks to increased competition from legacy automakers and new Chinese entrants. ANALYSIS The timing is notable: Musk's rhetorical pivot toward AI accelerated just as the automotive growth story weakened, raising the question of whether the narrative shift is strategic vision or strategic necessity.
Meanwhile, the robotics investment thesis is attracting comparisons. Morgan Stanley estimates the market potential for humanoid robotics could be worth $5 trillion by 20503. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said that "every industrial company will become a robotics company". Nvidia has developed Isaac GR00T, a universal open-source AI foundation model for humanoid robots, and debuted its Halos full-stack safety system for robots in June. Nvidia's Jetson Thor supercomputer is used by leading robotics companies including Boston Dynamics and Amazon Robotics. Tesla, for its part, has said its factories could eventually reach an annual production capacity of 10 million Optimus units2. Nvidia says its annual revenue run rate for physical AI will reach $100 billion.
ANALYSIS The contrast is instructive: Nvidia is selling infrastructure to the entire robotics ecosystem, while Tesla is betting on being both the manufacturer and the platform — a vertically integrated wager that requires the AI narrative to hold up long enough for Optimus and robotaxis to generate real revenue.
What's next
Tesla's next quarterly earnings call will be the immediate test of whether the rhetorical balance shifts further. ◆ If Musk's AI and robotics share of speaking time continues to climb past 50%, the company's earnings calls will functionally become AI product briefings attached to an automotive income statement — a duality that investors, analysts, and regulators will eventually force into resolution. The question is whether the robots arrive before the patience runs out.