Sean O’Kane是一名记者，花了十年时间报道快速发展的交通行业业务和技术，包括特斯拉以及追逐埃隆·马斯克的众多初创公司。他最近是彭博新闻的记者，帮助报道了一些最臭名昭著的电动车SPAC失败故事。他曾在The Verge工作，也报道消费技术，主持许多短视频和长视频，进行产品和编辑摄影，并曾在红牛空中赛车飞机里差点晕过去。
您可以通过发送电子邮件至 sean.okane@techcrunch.com 来联系或验证 Sean 的外联信息：mailto:sean.okane@techcrunch.com，或者通过 Signal 上的加密消息联系 okane.01。
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Elon Musk wants you to believe Tesla is no longer a car company, even if it’s still shaped like one. The company shipped nearly half a million cars last quarter and made 70% of its money from car sales.
Still, Musk has spent the last few years making the case that Tesla is really an AI and robotics company, even if some of the AI happens to live in cars. And whatever the company financials suggest, Musk’s attention has been moving decisively to the AI parts of the company — projects like the Optimus robot and fully autonomous robotaxis — as the everyday concerns of a carmaker get pushed to the side.
To show how that shift happened, TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs：https://www.hudson-labs.com/, 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 the company’s quarterly earnings calls.
The startup sourced transcripts of the calls 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 shows that Musk now speaks about artificial intelligence, along with robotaxis and Full Self-Driving software, nearly 50% of the time he opens his mouth. That’s up from prior years, like in 2022, when he typically spent 15% to 20% of the time on those efforts.
Over the same period, Musk was often making the case that autonomy justified the company’s soaring value.
“If you value Tesla as just an auto company — fundamentally, it’s the wrong framework,” Musk said on the Q1 call in 2024：https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/tesla-inc-nasdaqtsla-q1-2024-earnings-call-transcript-1291673/#q-and-a-session. “If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.”
Talk of robotics has shot up sharply in the last three years, too.
Tesla revealed it was working on a humanoid robot known as Optimus in 2021. In the year that followed, Musk only spent around 2% or less of his time talking about the project. Over the past year, though, he’s spent at least 10% of his remarks talking up Optimus, with it occupying nearly a third of his focus on the Q3 call in 2025.
Musk ramped up how often he talks about these futuristic ideas at the same time that Tesla’s core automotive business stopped growing. As a result, he now spends less than a third of his time on earnings calls talking about cars and manufacturing. On that same Q3 call last year, Musk spent less than 20% of his time talking about the automotive business.
The other Tesla executives who appear on the company’s earnings calls, like chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja and vice president of engineering Lars Moravy, have been much slower to shift their focus. Even on some of the most recent calls, they have spent around 30% of the time focusing on the automotive business, with their next-most common topics being AI, robotaxi, and Full Self-Driving.
Their attention has shifted, but they are lagging behind Musk’s enthusiasm for AI and robotics, most likely because those efforts aren’t yet generating any real returns.
These other Tesla executives used to spend nearly 50% of their time on these calls (or more) talking about making and selling cars. That all changed in 2024 as the car business started to suffer thanks to increased competition from legacy automakers and new Chinese entrants.
But when they do join Musk in talking up the future, they match the lofty rhetoric of their boss, the world’s richest man.
“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 nonlinear. The future is going to be great.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission：https://techcrunch.com/techcrunch-affiliate-monetization-standards/. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com：mailto:sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
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