Elon Musk sets 2026 Optimus sale date. Here’s where other humanoid robots stand.
Ahead of Tuesday’s earnings, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the carmaker will begin selling its Optimus humanoid robot in 2026. In fact, Optimus has already started performing tasks autonomously, like handling batteries, in one of Tesla’s facilities, according to its earnings report.
“Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026,” the executive posted on X.
During Tuesday’s earnings call, Musk also estimated that the long-term demand for general purpose humanoid robots is “in excess of 20 billion units,” a number he got to by combining the 8 billion people on Earth who will apparently want one with the industrial use cases.
These dates, while broad, and those estimations should be taken with a grain of salt. Plenty can happen to the timeline between now and then, and if Optimus is indeed delayed, it would be far from the first time a Musk product suffered from a dynamic timeline. Very early on, Musk suggested that production on the humanoid could begin in 2023.
